Poor Product Data Is Costing UK Construction £3.8bn a Year

12 July 2026 · 4 min read · Cost Management

A report published this month by GS1 UK and Barbour ABI puts a number on something our cost managers have seen for years: poor, fragmented product data is quietly bleeding time and money out of UK construction projects. Their estimate — based on the savings the NHS achieved through GS1 barcode scanning under Scan4Safety — suggests the industry is losing up to £3.8 billion a year on avoidable product information problems.

What the report actually says

The headline figure is built from a familiar logic: NHS Scan4Safety applied GS1 standards to track every product, patient and place. That delivered a 7.42% reduction in inventory costs. Construction's annual product spend is estimated at £51bn, so the implied waste if the same inefficiency applies is around £3.8bn a year.

The accompanying survey of construction professionals is, frankly, more interesting than the headline number:

• 98% are aware of the Building Safety Act.
• Only 21% feel fully prepared to meet its requirements.
• 60% say inefficient product information is slowing their projects.
• 52% believe poor digitalisation is already costing their business money — rising to 69% among larger firms.
• Nearly half describe the industry's current approach to product data as "disorganised".

The £3.8bn figure isn't really about barcodes. It's the cost of someone on site ringing three manufacturers to confirm a fixing specification, the rework when a substituted product turns out to be incompatible with the cavity barrier, the hours spent compiling a golden thread file at handover. None of that is dramatic on its own. Across the industry, it's £3.8bn.

Where the cost actually lands

In our experience, the cost of poor product data doesn't show up as one big line item — it shows up as small, repeated frictions that erode margin and programme:

• Specification drift. Substitutions made on site because the specified product isn't available, can't be verified, or doesn't quite match the drawings — and the cost variation arrives weeks later.
• Rework and defect rectification. Products installed before full performance data is reviewed against the design intent. Acoustic, fire, or thermal performance mismatches discovered during commissioning.
• Procurement lead-time waste. Buyers chasing technical datasheets, DoPs, and certificates from multiple sources, often by email, often in the wrong revision.
• QS contingent valuation. Variations and contractor claims become harder to verify when the installed product differs from the contracted specification, with no clean audit trail.
• Handover chaos. The O&M manual lands late, in the wrong format, missing key product data — exactly the information the Building Safety Act requires in the golden thread.

Why Building Safety Act readiness matters here

The same report highlights the gap between BSA awareness and readiness. This is the cost-management angle our clients keep missing: the BSA's golden thread principle requires a full, traceable record of what was specified, what was actually installed, and what its performance characteristics are. If your product data is fragmented at handover, the gap between awareness (98%) and readiness (21%) becomes a compliance problem — not just an information problem.

For higher-risk buildings, the Building Safety Regulator's recently announced targeted approach to Building Assessment Certificates makes this clearer: assessors will increasingly want to see evidence, not assurances. A clean product data trail is now part of the cost of compliance, not an optional extra.

Practical Steps

1. Start at specification, not handover. Require all specified products to come with structured data — GTIN, DoP reference, key performance characteristics — before they enter the cost plan. We help clients embed this into procurement specifications early, so the data is captured once and reused.
2. Treat the cost plan as a product register. Every line item should reference a product, not just a description. This converts the cost plan into the seed of the golden thread, not a separate document maintained at the end.
3. Capture substitutions as variations, with data. When a substitution is agreed on site, record the new product's full data set in the same format as the original. Don't let substitutions become invisible to the QS and the eventual O&M.
4. Budget for digital infrastructure now. The 69% figure for larger firms losing money to poor digitalisation suggests the pain scales with project size. A modest line in the prelims for structured product data management pays back many times over on projects above £5m.
5. Stress-test BSA readiness before tender, not at handover. If you're only thinking about the golden thread at PC, you've left it too late. We include a BSA readiness check in our pre-tender reviews for clients with in-scope schemes.

Sources: GS1 UK & Barbour ABI, The State of the Construction Sector (July 2026); Construction News, "Construction 'losing £3.8bn a year' through poor product data" (7 July 2026); Building Safety Regulator, BSR Building Assessment Certificates targeted approach statement (July 2026); NHS England Scan4Safety evaluation; RICS Building Cost Information Service (BCIS) construction cost analysis. Figures and survey results as reported in the cited sources. This article is for general guidance and does not constitute regulatory or legal advice.