19 September 2024
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Adrian Hurley has been elected as President of the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA) for 2024-25.
He is managing director of the design, installation and maintenance contractor FP Hurley & Sons which was founded by his grandfather Frank 75 years ago.
Hurley has been involved with BESA since 2019 when he joined council as the elected representative for Wales. He joined the membership committee in 2021 and was appointed BESA Vice President in 2022.
He has been a powerful advocate for improving skills and training across the sector and empowering young engineers to help the country achieve its Net Zero and building safety goals.
He told the association’s AGM that he was honoured to be elected as President during BESA’s 120th anniversary year. “We are rightly proud of our history and the impact BESA has made over the years,” he said. “As we face up to another period of major transition, the Association will once again provide leadership, guidance, and expertise to ensure members seize the opportunities for growth and diversification that are essential to the future of our businesses and the people we employ.”
He later told the annual BESA President’s Lunch that the association would continue to press the new government to commit to a national programme of commercial building retrofits adding that BESA members would be essential “to this now urgent work”.
Hurley pointed out that the UK has around 30 million existing buildings, many of which are “in dire need of an upgrade – and it is widely acknowledged that this will be a fundamental building block of Net Zero”.
“The deployment of new technologies, like heat pumps, is exciting and progressive, but there is so much we could still do to improve the performance of what is already built and installed,” he told his audience at the Oxo Tower in London.
However, he said he was concerned that the “enormous task” of retrofitting and refurbishing millions of buildings would be hampered by a serious skills shortage. “It will take a combination of innovation, more strategic use of digital technology, and better recruitment to address this.”
Meanwhile, author and journalist Peter Apps will open this year’s Building Engineering Services Association (BESA) Annual Conference in London on 17 October.
Apps is one of the UK’s best-known writers currently covering the highly controversial topics of building safety and social housing. Over a 10-year career at the specialist magazine Inside Housing, he has won numerous awards for his news and analysis of the country’s affordable housing crisis.
He was one of the few commentators to raise concerns about combustible cladding and high-rise buildings before the Grenfell Tower fire, and his reporting in the aftermath of the disaster shone light on the likely causes of the blaze. This reporting culminated in his book, Show Me The Bodies, which won the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.
The BESA Annual Conference 2024 includes an exhibition area and will be followed in the evening by the BESA Industry Awards dinner. Registration is available here. For more details about the event, along with exhibition and sponsorship opportunities, contact: [email protected]
