Hasn’t 2025 flown by? It feels like yesterday I was writing down my thoughts about the 2024 conference and yet here we are, apparently 12 months later…

The conference this year was another feel-good event, with some of the most impressive people in our industry and community coming together to share work, ideas and plans. These people are not driven by mega-bucks or building the tallest tower, but by continual improvement both on a personal/professional level and as an industry.

There was real technical excellence from a number of speakers. Lois Hurst shared her PhD on Embodied Carbon in retrofit; the upshot of which was that on balance you cannot go ‘too far’ with a retrofit, because the operational energy savings will always outweigh the embodied energy. There is of course more to be considered when weighing up strategies for the scaling up of retrofit (i.e. when that carbon is released, and of course costs), but for individual householders this is hugely reassuring.

Ann-Marie Fallon gave a whistle-stop tour of the learnings from the most recent Architype school projects, which was a master class in fitting a lot complex, technical information into a compact presentation and keeping it easily digestible to the audience. This raised a lot of questions about how we address Embodied Carbon in large scale buildings, with new fire regulations – but also the impact of items other than the building fabric itself; mechanical and electrical design, fixtures and fittings, etc.

Ann-Marie Fallon at AECB Conference 2025

What was great about the day, was that the technical deep dives were complimented by projects with real social value reinforcing their approach to sustainability. James York, Piers Sadler and Laura Baron all shared their unique approaches to low energy design, with Case Studies that were first and foremost intended for ‘public’ good - whether that be achieved by authentic community engagement or thoughtful heritage analysis.

My personal favourite came from Fran Bradshaw supported by Jae Cotterell, who raised a much more fundamental question about the construction industry. Setting her arguments in the context of the Grenfell enquiry - the most devastating example of the industry’s problematic culture around quality and responsibility – Fran Bradshaw dissected the make up of the construction industry and challenged the status quo in terms of procurement and contracting.

She used a case study to demonstrate alternative routes to procurement - in this case a two stage tender, where costs were collaboratively generated and the tender based entirely on quality – and the audience was then encouraged to break into groups and discuss collaborative approaches to procurement which work for both people and projects. During this discussion, my group heard about the Integrated Project Insurance (IPI) model, which takes a similar approach whereby teams are selected based on qualities other than price and then costs are calculated as part of the process.

I was so pleased that this discussion took place, as we have so many conversations about the value of the AECB and Passivhaus standards in providing quality assurance in an industry that is famous for bodging, without ever looking to address the route of this (perhaps we feel it is out of our control). It is so empowering to be promoting not just ways of building, but methods of procurement that are fair and equitable and that at their core foster a positive and collaborative team dynamic. As I always say, it is a lot easier to achieve great things when we are all pulling in the same direction.

AECB Conference 2025

Passivhaus Plus Certification Success