Jon Vanstone, chair of Certass Trade Association, discusses why the industry’s biggest test is actually a battle for common sense.

Imagine choosing your heart surgeon the same way we pick building contractors: “Hi, yes, I’ll go with the cheapest one. No, I don’t care about experience, just who’s quickest and cheapest. What could possibly go wrong?”

Welcome to the world of procurement in construction and glazing, where spreadsheets speak louder than sanity, and the word ‘value’ has been hijacked to mean ‘the absolute rock-bottom price, minus VAT, with a wink.’

For decades, the industry’s buying habits have been driven not by logic or outcomes, but by a weird and dangerous superstition that paying less for something magically makes it better.

But reality, armed with fire, mould, and tragedy, has crashed the party.

Procurement. A word that should come with a free pillow and eye mask. But in truth, procurement decisions are where every bold ambition lives or dies. Think of it as a stealthy puppeteer that controls quality, safety, and public trust and all this whilst wearing a beige tie.

If procurement is done wrong, and by wrong I mean choosing lowest-price bids without context, the consequences are not abstract. They’re terrifyingly real. We’ve seen them. And we’ve mourned them.

Every large construction organisation has a values poster in the break room. It’s usually laminated. And entirely useless.

It’s because culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you pay for.

You can run all the training days you want, but if your contract still goes to the guy with the lowest bid and the loosest ethics, then congratulations, you’ve just run a masterclass in hypocrisy.

Culture only changes when contracts change. When winning work requires competence, transparency, and traceability.

The real cost of cheap

Here’s the great lie of cheap procurement: you save money.

What you actually do is defer the bill. And when it comes, it’s nastier, larger, and has consequences that don’t fit neatly in an Excel cell. These are commonly remediations, reputational damage, regulatory heat, and the slow erosion of public trust.

You might save £2k on the front end. But if that results in unsafe installations or poor materials, you can pay ten times that just on cleaning it up and often in public view.

The solution

This isn’t just an installer issue. Or a client issue. It’s an everyone issue. And it needs everyone to raise their game and yes, their standards.

• Suppliersneed to stop playing hide-and-seek with product data.
• Fabricatorsmust prove their processes are tighter than a drum.
• Installersshould treat record-keeping not as admin, but as professional pride.
• Clientsmust be willing to pay for actual outcomes, not hope.

And certification bodies? We need to make competence cool again. We’re working on it. Seriously.

Through Certass, SMEs aren’t just reacting to new regulation, they’re getting ahead of it. Our members know what’s coming because we’re in the room when it’s being written.

We translate complexity into clarity giving our members the tools to not just survive, but compete and win on quality. And thanks to our ‘For the Members’ principle, every initiative we launch starts with a single question: how does this help our members succeed?

If we flip the procurement model and we reward genuine value over empty cost, we don’t just fix the sector. We reinvent it.

• We rebuild trust with homeowners.
• We become a magnet for talent.
• We elevate competence into a commercial advantage.

Then procurement isn’t the industry’s biggest problem. It becomes the biggest lever.

Final thought

You get what you incentivise. If we keep choosing the lowest bidder, we shouldn’t be surprised when we get the lowest results.

But if we start rewarding professionalism, accountability, and value?

We might just get the industry we all claim to want.

And maybe, just maybe, that laminated poster in the break room of the Tier 1 contractor will finally tell the truth.