For the second year running, we’ve taken home The Retrofit Academy’s Award for Best Retrofit Contractor of the Year, as well as secured the win for Best Retrofit Employer award for the first time.
The Retrofit Academy’s awards celebrate the cream of the crop in the retrofit decarbonisation sector, recognising all the incredible effort, talent, and commitment to excellence that our industry represents. The event brings together hundreds of like-minded professionals in one place to acknowledge the best and the brightest in our collective efforts toward our net zero goals and the positive impacts being made in societies.
Each category is judged by a panel of leading industry stakeholders and government officials to determine which entry is the winning one, taking time out of their own lives to support what the awards stand for – high-quality residential decarbonisation.
On the awards, our owner Derek Horrocks said: “I’m blown away to win two categories at the decarbonisation sector’s most prestigious awards. To me it confirms that our approach to retrofit decarbonisation is the recipe for success. Putting people first – both in regard to my own team as well as the thousands of residents and client homes we’ve worked on in the past year – is key to the delivery of a high-quality service and that is at the heart of our ethos.
“Since winning the Best Retrofit Contractor Award in 2023, we haven’t rested on our laurels either. Instead, we’ve put almost all members of our team through The Retrofit Academy’s accredited training programmes to further educate and upskill them – proactively upskilling and training every single member of our team.
“We’ve put in place measures and have striven to create a culture wherein our team can be assured of both their own career progression, as well as the difference they are making within the wider team, and in turn, the difference our wider team is making within the world.
“Our core goal is to provide some of the most vulnerable in society with a home that they can feel warm, comfortable, and healthy in. Through our work we have achieved this for thousands of families over the past year. Our retrofit decarbonisation measures improve the residents’ health, wellbeing, and finances in one coordinated approach with the changes we see in communities following installation being night and day. These awards are symbolic that we’re doing well, but it by no means we will slow our momentum.”
Entering the awards allowed us to also take stock of the huge progress made in skills and training in the past year alone. Along with this latest ‘Best Retrofit Employer’ award, we are Investors in People Silver accredited, upskilling our workforce and supporting more subcontractors and our partners to achieve retrofit qualification’s. Meanwhile, we have built our apprenticeship levels up to more than 12% of the business – well above the industry average and with aims to increase this further to 15% – and providing training opportunities to the wider supply chain through CITB funding, Think Construction and The Retrofit Academy.
Our managing director Gary Lawson said: “It’s a testament to the profound commitment, passion, and high-quality delivery of our team that we have been named Retrofit Contractor of the Year two years in a row. SBS has grown rapidly, and with it the extent of the societal change we’re now able to create. It’s an honour to be at the forefront the mission to solve fuel poverty and the climate crisis, working closely with The Retrofit Academy to inspire the next generation to follow in our footsteps.”
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