GS1 UK and Barbour ABI just published research putting a number on bad product data in construction: £3.8bn a year, by their estimate. What that report doesn’t mention is that the EU stopped treating this as optional back in January. Manufacturers now have to declare a product’s carbon footprint before it can be sold into the bloc, and a digital passport system is coming behind it. The UK is still trying to convince people it’s worth doing voluntarily.

The number comes from a survey of more than 300 construction professionals and 15 senior industry figures, commissioned by GS1 UK and run independently by Barbour ABI. The method is borrowed from another tried & tested program. GS1 UK took Scan4Safety, an NHS program that standardized how hospitals identify products, patients, and locations, and applied its measured 7.42% cut in inventory costs to construction’s roughly £51bn annual product spend, arriving at £3.8bn.

GS1 UK admits upfront that this is an estimate. It adopted a saving percentage from a sector where a single body, the NHS, could mandate a standard and enforce it across every trust. Construction has thousands of independent buyers making their own calls on what counts as good enough data, and GS1 UK itself points out that this fragmentation could push the real figure up. Iain Walker, director of industry engagement at GS1 UK, called the figure evidence of “the size of the prize if we get this right.”

The cost increases as you end-up spending hours on call with a manufacturer to confirm a fire rating, rework after an undocumented substitution, and decisions nobody can prove six months later when someone asks for evidence. Finance teams have no ledger line for any of it. 52% of respondents say a lack of digitalization is already costing their business revenue, rising to 69% at larger firms. Just under half describe their own approach to product data as disorganized.

Nine years after Grenfell, 98% of construction professionals have heard of the Building Safety Act. Only 21% say they’re fully ready for it. Nine in ten know what the golden thread is supposed to be. 14% say they actually understand it.

The 14% figure is more significant than the 98% figure. It’s a better indicator of readiness than the awareness number. Understanding the golden thread and being able to produce the record behind it are different challenges. The golden thread only works if the record of what was specified, installed, and changed can be trusted.

A disconnected PDF with no owner and no version history can’t do that. Industry analyst Brian Green described the effect on site teams: weak systems have “left those on the ground feeling powerless to push back” against time and cost pressure. 84% of respondents say products get substituted on site, and each swap needs proof the replacement performs the same way, backed by a data trail someone can actually produce.

GS1 UK is trying to build voluntary momentum around shared identifiers in the UK. The EU took a different approach: it legislated the requirement, with compliance dates that are already active.

The revised Construction Products Regulation, 2024/3110, entered into force in January 2025. Since January 8, 2026, manufacturers of priority categories including concrete, steel, and insulation have had to declare Global Warming Potential as part of their Declaration of Performance, calculated to the EN 15804 standard.

A legal framework for a construction-specific digital product passport sits alongside it, layered on top of the EU’s broader Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, with full obligations phasing in through the early 2030s. Manufacturers selling into the EU need this data structured today. The compliance window opened in January and it’s already running.

Plenty of products specified on UK sites come from manufacturers who already hold this data for their EU sales, and UK exporters selling into Europe face the same requirement regardless of what GS1’s domestic campaign achieves. The EU’s passport framework also leans on the same structured, machine-readable identifiers that GS1 promotes through GTINs and Digital Link. It has made mandatory what GS1 UK has been asking the industry to adopt voluntarily.

By comparison, 93% of UK respondents see value in product identifiers, but only 21% say they’re ready for legislation that’s been in force since 2023. The EU’s GWP declaration mandate started on its scheduled date in January 2026 regardless of industry readiness.

The starting point, as research suggests, is identity not analytics. You must first agree how products get identified across your supply chain. Push manufacturers for structured data feeds instead of another PDF. Capture substitutions at the point they happen on site instead of reconstructing the story weeks later at handover.

SMEs make up 99% of construction businesses, and almost everyone surveyed named at least one barrier: unclear direction, competing priorities, cost, thin digital skills. A tool that needs a data team to run it will only reach the top of the market.

The strongest product opportunities are narrow and specific, not broad platforms: identifier adoption, manufacturer data feeds that update automatically, substitution tracking that builds its own audit trail, and handover records that assemble themselves during delivery instead of being reconstructed at practical completion. Given what’s already binding in the EU, a founder building any of this has a second buyer base waiting whether or not the UK ever legislates.

GS1 UK is trying to build voluntary adoption because it believes that’s the right way to get the industry moving. The EU’s approach shows the alternative: legislate the same standard and set a date. The UK’s own path likely runs through similar regulatory pressure eventually, whether through updates to the Building Safety Act’s evidentiary requirements or through market pull from EU-facing manufacturers who already hold the data. The open question for UK construction is which standard it ends up building on: one it chooses now, or whichever version Brussels has already put in place by the time the pressure arrives.

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