HVCA president Bob Shelley says meeting the demands of customers and clients is the key to remaining 'in business and in profit' in the times ahead.
'Building engineering services contractors have reached not just one crossroads, but several - and the choices they face in their business lives have never been so challenging, nor so complex,' Mr Shelley told his audience at the annual general meeting of the HVCA.

'I refer, of course, to the continuing recession, to the ever more rigorous legislation with which contractors must comply, to the increasing demand for renewable technologies - and to the ongoing quest for sustainability across the built environment.'

Commenting on how the industry has dramatically changed in the last 10 years he said he had no doubt that, in another five or ten years' time, it would be very different again. He added that in the past decade, sustainability had come 'to pervade everything we are and everything we do.'

Looking to the future he said: 'Whatever the 'climate change sceptics' may want us to believe, the development of a low-carbon economy is with us for the long haul - and represents the biggest commercial opportunity our sector has ever known. The rewards are there for the taking - provided we have the skills, the competence, the initiative and the will to reach out and grasp them.'

Mr Shelley added that the HVCA existed to provide the advice, guidance, support and leadership its members required to help with the changes ahead.

He added: 'We have at our disposal the strength, the resources and the expertise of an organisation that has honed its services, expanded its footprint and built its influence over more than a century.

'I see it as one of the principal objectives of my term of office to ensure - not only that it continues to fulfill these crucial roles, but that we add even more value by helping members and their businesses to grow, to develop and to progress,' he continued.

'We are already the premier organisation in our sector - and I aim to do everything in my power to keep it that way.'

The goal, he said, was to create an Association that was more effective than ever in delivering the 'services that genuinely meet the needs of its members' and in 'representing their interests across the construction sector as a whole, and along the 'corridors of power' of Westminster and Whitehall'.