A new report from GS1 UK and Barbour ABI reckons UK construction could be losing up to £3.8bn a year because product data is fragmented, inconsistent and hard to share. The waste shows up as delays, rework and manual checking, and it now doubles as a Building Safety Act problem: only 21% of firms feel ready to meet the Act. The fix isn’t a shiny new platform. It’s a barcode-and-standards approach the NHS already proved works.
Ask anyone who runs projects where their week goes and you’ll hear a version of the same answer: chasing information. Which spec is current? Is this product the one that was approved, or a substitution someone made on site? Where’s the certificate for it? A new report finally puts a price on all that digging around, and it’s not small.
GS1 UK, the supply chain standards body, teamed up with construction intelligence firm Barbour ABI and surveyed 317 UK construction professionals. Their headline finding is blunt. Poor product data could be costing the industry up to £3.8bn a year. Not on exotic mega-projects. On the everyday grind of finding, checking and trusting information about the thousands of products that go into every building.
Here’s the part that should make you sit up. This isn’t only a productivity story anymore. Post-Grenfell, the same messy data that slows your job down is also the thing regulators now expect you to produce on demand. And the way out, according to the report, is something healthcare sorted years ago with barcodes and shared standards.
Bad data is quietly taxing your margins and your compliance at the same time. The good news is the tools to fix it mostly already exist, sitting unused on the products you buy every day.
Where the £3.8bn actually goes
The avoidable cost hiding in every spec
The number isn’t plucked from thin air, but it is an extrapolation, so worth understanding before you quote it. The team looked at NHS Scan4Safety, a programme that uses barcode scanning and shared data standards to track every patient, product and place. Using those standards cut inventory costs by 7.42%. Apply that same saving to construction’s estimated £51bn annual spend on products, and you land at roughly £3.8bn a year the industry could stop wasting.
What does that waste look like on a real job? GS1 UK’s Iain Walker describes it as the cost of poor information: time spent searching for product data, manual checking, unclear substitutions, errors that need resolving, and decisions that are hard to prove after the fact. On site that turns into delays, extra cost and weaker accountability. The survey backs it up. 52% of professionals say poor digitalisation is already costing their business money, rising to 69% at larger firms, and 60% say patchy access to product information is actively slowing their projects.
Roughly half described how they manage product data today as disorganised. That’s not a tech-laggard problem confined to small subbies. It’s the default state across much of the sector, and it’s expensive precisely because it’s invisible. Nobody puts “two hours hunting for a datasheet” on a cost report.
- £51bn a year. The industry’s estimated annual spend on construction products.
- 7.42% saving. The inventory cost reduction seen when GS1 standards were applied in healthcare.
- ~£3.8bn. What that same efficiency would be worth if construction captured it.
No clean data, no Building Safety Act
The golden thread only works if the data underneath it does
This is where the report stops being a productivity nag and starts being a survival issue. The Building Safety Act requires a “golden thread” of information: a single, digital, trustworthy record of a building’s products and decisions, maintained across its whole life and handed over at the end. You can’t build a reliable golden thread on top of data that’s scattered across emails, PDFs and someone’s memory.
The survey shows how big that gap is. Awareness of the Act sits at 98%, but only 21% of firms are confident they can actually meet its requirements. Nine in ten have heard of the golden thread, yet just 14% say they fully understand it. That’s a lot of firms nodding along to a legal duty they haven’t operationalised. And the stakes are real: we’ve covered how retrospective fire-safety liability helped push established contractors like Ardmore into administration, order book and all.
The harder question is whether everyone… is working from the same trusted information.Iain Walker, Director of Industry Engagement, GS1 UK
That’s the crux. Buying another document management system doesn’t help if the product data flowing into it is unreliable in the first place. Compliance and efficiency turn out to be the same problem wearing two hats, which is also why safety records are increasingly treated as financial assets that insurers and major clients now price in.
The briefing that keeps construction leaders one step ahead
Deals, data and the decisions reshaping the industry, every week. No fluff.
Join 3000+ ReadersConstruction is borrowing the NHS barcode playbook
GS1, GTINs, and the identifier already on your products
The fix the report points to isn’t futuristic. Retail and healthcare have run on unique product identifiers for decades, and GS1 says more than 2 million companies already use its standards across 200 million products. The core idea is a simple code, usually a Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), that acts as a product’s fingerprint. Attach the data to the code once, and everyone down the chain can pull the same trusted information just by scanning the number.
The kicker is that thousands of construction products already carry these codes, often because the manufacturer also sells into retail. They just aren’t being used. The identifier is there on the packaging, then it drops out of the process the moment the product hits site. Nobody’s using it to drive the transaction or feed the golden thread. So a lot of the plumbing for a fix is already installed. It’s a habit problem more than a hardware problem.
For ConTech founders and operators, that’s the opening. The report hands you a documented, quantified pain and a proven mechanism to solve it. The catch, as ever in this industry, is turning “we know this is a problem” into “we’ll pay to fix it.” A £3.8bn number and a hard compliance deadline make that conversation a lot easier than it was a year ago.
How the two approaches compare
Same job, very different day
The difference between fragmented data and shared standards isn’t abstract. It changes what a normal task on a normal project feels like.
| Everyday task | With fragmented data (today) | With shared standards |
|---|---|---|
| Finding a product’s spec or certificate | Email chains, PDFs, phone calls, guesswork | Scan the code, pull the current record |
| Handling a substitution | Unclear what changed or whether it’s compliant | New product, new code, data updates with it |
| Proving Building Safety Act compliance | Reconstruct the golden thread after the fact | The record builds itself as work happens |
| Handover to the building owner | Boxes of documents nobody can verify | A single, trusted digital record |
It’s an extrapolation, not a measured loss. GS1 UK and Barbour ABI took the 7.42% inventory cost saving achieved by the NHS Scan4Safety programme and applied it to construction’s estimated £51bn annual product spend. That points to roughly £3.8bn a year in avoidable cost. Treat it as a scale-of-the-prize estimate rather than a precise invoice. (Source)
It’s the requirement to create and maintain a single, digital, trustworthy record of a building’s design, products and changes across its whole lifecycle. The idea is that whoever is responsible can prove safety and demonstrate compliance at any point, and hand the full record to the building owner at completion. (Source)
Because the golden thread the Act demands can only be as reliable as the underlying product information. If you can’t say with certainty which product went where, or whether a substitution was compliant, you can’t prove the building is safe. That’s why the report links poor data directly to the difficulty firms have meeting post-Grenfell requirements. (Source)
GS1 is the body behind the barcodes used in retail worldwide. A GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) is a unique code that identifies a specific product. Attach data to that code and any party can access the same trusted information by scanning it. GS1 says over 2 million companies already use its standards across 200 million products. (Source)
Aware, but not ready. The survey of 317 professionals found 98% awareness of the Act, yet only 21% were confident they could meet its requirements. On the golden thread specifically, nine in ten had heard of it but only 14% said they fully understood it. (Source)
Not necessarily. Thousands of construction products already carry GS1 identifiers, often because the manufacturer also sells into retail. The problem is those codes aren’t being used to drive the process or feed the golden thread. A lot of the fix is about using what’s already there rather than buying something new. (Source)
Related Articles
4,000 Firms Gone in a Year: What the UK Construction Insolvency Crisis Actually Means
Why Safety Data Is Worth Money, and Incidents Cost You 4-6%
Construction News: Construction ‘losing £3.8bn a year’ through poor product data
Construction Management (CIOB): Construction still unprepared for Building Safety Act
GS1 UK: Unravelling the golden thread
Barbour ABI: What you need to know about construction product traceability
Saferhighways: Poor product data costing construction billions
