CPA Bulletin

14 CPA Bulletin > February 2025 www.cpa.uk.net CPA CONFERENCE REVIEW: 2 taking their skills with them, creating a sizeable knowledge gap. Furthermore, new recruits had to be guaranteed a safe, caring working environment offering good career opportunities. Steve said that the drive to Net Zero was itself revolutionary, requiring an appropriate response. Not so long ago, he said, terms like AI (artificial intelligence), digitisation, sustainability and battery energy storage were unfamiliar; now they are part of everyday vocabulary and represent challenges that workers have to be trained for. Implementing new technology and techniques also required care and understanding, he said. It was all very well having a target of having a certain proportion of, say, non-road mobile machinery (NRMM) on sites running on non-fossil energy sources by 2030, but specific plans for implementation and timetables to achieve it were needed for phasing in solutions – especially as new equipment is more expensive and should attract an appropriate hire rate. Residual values were also uncertain. Steve argued strongly for a more pragmatic, commonsense approach from governments and regulatory bodies, especially “with our politicians and some Tier 1 contractors and their clients racing to mandate policies too quickly to outdo one another, and as manufacturers race to gain commercial advantages over one another, so plant hirers then have little option but to conform to these mandates. Ultimately it is the end buyer, us the hirer, who feels the pain at the sharp end,” he said. Steve said CPA Members, end users, hirers and suppliers must be able to continue producing and using fossil-fuel powered equipment while alternatives were sensibly phased in that could genuinely give the same performance as diesel equivalents, with an infrastructure capable of supplying the future fuels required. “Evolving to get there without these ridiculous targets is how we will do it, not by panic and knee-jerk reactions to meet impossible political targets which suit their own agendas and that of the noisy minorities.” So ultimately, moving forward, collaboration was essential between hirers and contractors in ongoing dialogue from the earliest project stages. The Conference conversations kicked off with a scene-setting first session entitled ‘The Plant-hire Sector in 2024 - Where the Industry Currently Sits in the Wider Economic and Political Context’ , with Chris Cassley , CPA Policy Manager, and Jamie Charles , Lead Economist with Oxford Economics. The consulting and forecasting business has just completed an in-depth report commissioned by CPA into the state and significance of the industry. Called ‘The Economic Impact of the UK Construction Plant-hire Sector’, it was officially published on the day of the Conference and is now available on the CPA website at www.cpa.uk.net Chris Cassley said the aim had been to evaluate the industry and the role it plays in the wider economy to give invaluable information that would support CPA’s arguments in discussions with government, lobby groups and other stakeholders. The data would also help CPA members make their own representations. Jamie Charles spoke of the exhaustive and painstaking process of amassing the required information from company accounts, survey findings, dialogue with industry associations and interviews with industry experts. The report’s headline conclusions include that the GVA (gross added value) contribution of the sector to the UK economy is estimated at £14.0 billion and that it is responsible for 191,500 jobs. Interestingly, £218 is added to the economy for every £100 directly generated by the plant hire industry. Jamie said that the economic benefits were split into three channels: direct impact, which includes the impact of companies themselves; indirect impact which occurs through the supply chain spending of those firms; and the induced benefits which arise fromworkers in the sector and the supply chain spending their wages. Under these categories, the industry’s direct contribution to the economy is £6.4 billion, with an additional £3.2 billion indirect contribution and £4.4 billion being induced. Regarding employment, 88,600 people are directly employed, 44,800 indirectly employed and 58,200 jobs are supported indirectly through workers’ spending. Such figures are invaluable in showing plant-hire’s overall significance. The mature nature of hire in the UK is shown by the statistic that, while GDP contributions by the construction plant-hire sector across EU-27 nations averages 1.8%, the figure for this country is 3.6%. Jamie added that UK firms earned an estimated £10.5 billion in revenue from construction plant-hire activities, supporting a £6.4 billion direct contribution to UK GDP in the form of wages, taxes, rates and so on. This is bigger than many other significant industry sectors, such as printing and electrical equipment manufacture.