FASET Annual General Meeting & Awards Evening 2025
10 Year Anniversary for the FASET AGM and Celebration Event.
Raising the Standard, Celebrating Excellence, Recommitting to Safety
“This year’s AGM marked a quiet milestone for FASET and a rather louder statement of intent for us here at FASET. On Thursday 20 November 2025, more than 100 colleagues from across our member organisations gathered at Worsley Park Country Club, near Manchester, for the association’s tenth anniversary Annual General Meeting and Awards.
“Ten years is not a long time in the life of a trade association, but in that decade FASET has moved from a niche specialist group of well-intentioned organisations to a powerful, credible voice for fall protection safety, widely respected by clients, regulators and our wider industry.
“It was therefore fitting that this anniversary event, shortlisted for Best Association Event at the 2025 Association Awards at the QE2 conference centre in London, should feel both celebratory and purposeful. That recognition matters. It reflects the quality of the programme, the professionalism of the team behind it and the fact that FASET continues to punch well above its weight when compared with far larger bodies. More importantly, it signals that our collective work, often undertaken away from the spotlight, is being noticed for the right reasons.
“Following the formal order of business, which was conducted with clarity and efficiency by all member organisations, we heard from a strong line-up of guest speakers. Contributions from CITB, DWP and IPAF brought valuable perspective on training, competence and the evolving expectations placed on those working at height.
“Their messages were direct, and timely, and they reinforced a shared national agenda; raising standards, supporting capability and ensuring our sector remains ahead of risk rather than reacting to it.
“Yet the most searing contribution of the day came from Dylan Skelhorn. Dylan’s account of his 33-foot fall in 2011 was as thought-provoking as it was unsettling. A chimney stack collapse, an unsecured ladder, a roofline that gave no second chances. The injuries he sustained have left him in lifelong pain and permanently changed the course of his life. He spoke not for drama, but for impact; a blunt reminder that incidents we might label “rare” remain brutally real for the individuals and families who live with the consequences. His determination to use that experience to prevent others suffering the same fate deserves our respect, and our attention. We thank him for his excellent contribution on the day.
“After a day rooted in evidence, professionalism and shared responsibility, the evening’s celebration was a welcome moment to recognise excellence across the Federation. The awards reflected both high standards of work and the character of the people delivering it.
“Nationwide Safety took the Excellence of Work Award, with Prodek Safety Systems highly commended. Trad UK received the Health, Safety and Environmental Achievement Award. The Outstanding Achievement Award went to John Walsh of Safety Net Services, while Scott Anderson of One Stop Safety Solutions was named Team Member of the Year, with Tomas Macevicius of Safety Netting and Scaffold Limited highly commended. These are achievements that speak for themselves and they set the benchmark for what good looks like in our field.
“Events of this quality do not happen without committed partners. We are grateful to our sponsors for their support and belief in the Association’s mission; HuckNets, Visor Fall Arrest Nets, Leon De Oro, CSCS, Sunbelt Rentals, IPAF, 3 Education, Nationwide Platforms, Trad UK, Altela, Creator Scaffold Designs and Business Daily Group, publisher of FM Business Daily.
“FASET’s tenth anniversary is a moment to look back with pride, but not to linger. Our task remains clear. To keep raising standards, to keep protecting lives and to ensure that everyone who works at height returns home safely. The AGM was a reminder of how far we have come, and how much more we can achieve together.”
Tony Seddon
Managing Director
FASET
Our Guest Speakers
Claire Smalley, DWP
The DWP briefing positioned construction, and specialist sectors such as fall protection, as critical to the Government’s ambition to lift labour market participation and reduce economic inactivity. Framed by the Get Britain Working White Paper, DWP outlined a reform programme aimed at achieving an 80 per cent employment rate through three connected shifts: a new integrated service combining Jobcentre Plus and the National Careers Service, locally led plans to tackle inactivity across England, and a Youth Guarantee ensuring every 18–21 year-old receives a route into work, training or education.
A strong theme was DWP’s renewed focus on employers. The Strategic Relationships Team, a national network of recruitment and employment sales managers, is being positioned as a single point of contact for sector bodies and businesses, offering tailored recruitment support, vacancy promotion, and access to Jobcentre facilities and events.
The presentation also addressed awareness gaps; DWP research indicates that around 70 per cent of employers remain unaware of the free support available, hence the drive for closer partnerships with trade associations.
Practical services highlighted included local employer advisers, a central employer services line, Disability Confident, work trials, sector-based work academies, Access to Work, redundancy support, and work experience routes. DWP closed by sharing impact data from its 2025 construction campaign, evidencing substantial employer participation and job starts, and inviting FASET members to make fuller use of these channels to widen talent pipelines.
Brian Parker, IPAF: The Principles of MEWP Recovery and Rescue
IPAF’s session centred on raising competence and readiness around Mobile Elevating Work Platform (MEWP) incidents through new recovery and rescue guidance. The talk opened with provisional 2025 accident data showing encouraging reductions in reports, persons involved and fatalities globally and in the UK and Ireland, underscoring that focused safety campaigns are having measurable effect.
IPAF then reviewed its global fatal-risk campaigns, including Stop Overturns, Crushing Can Kill, High Voltage and Falls from Platforms, and their growing international reach. The core of the presentation explained why new guidance was necessary: a fatal entrapment incident prompted a coroner’s finding that industry needed clearer, more practical direction on how to respond when a MEWP incident occurs. A multi-stakeholder working group, spanning OEMs, rental companies, Tier 1 contractors and technical experts, therefore developed a principles-based document that recognises no two emergencies are identical.
A key contribution is terminology clarity. “Recovery” is defined as safely bringing a platform down using ground or auxiliary controls, with or without occupants, to manage malfunctions, medical events, load-sensing lockouts or harness suspensions. “Rescue” is reserved for scenarios where lowering is not possible and another platform or method is required, for example after control failure, entanglement, instability or levelling faults.
IPAF introduced new supportive tools: three simple flowcharts for common recovery/rescue scenarios, a MEWP recovery/rescue plan template, and a clear allocation of duty-holder responsibilities. The close emphasised that MEWPs can themselves be effective rescue tools when properly planned and practised.
James Johnson, CITB
CITB’s presentation set out how it is reshaping support for employers to sustain a skilled, competent and inclusive construction workforce.
The keynote message was simplification: CITB is consolidating training funding into clearer, easier routes, with Employer Networks becoming the single primary channel from 30 September 2025 as the Skills & Training Fund closes. This responds directly to employer feedback about complexity and duplication.
The session also covered changes to grant levels. A temporary uplift, introduced when the Industry Accreditation card was withdrawn, has already supported more than 11,500 individuals and will end in December 2025, at which point relevant qualification grants revert to the £600 standard rate. Alongside this, CITB is introducing a new £240 grant for shorter “Award” qualifications at Level 2+ to reflect their reduced duration and cost.
The wider grant ecosystem was restated, from short-course tiers through long qualification and apprenticeship grants, with apprenticeship funding remaining a central lever for workforce renewal. Practical help is being expanded through the New Entrant Support Team, which will guide employers through apprenticeship set-up, standards, mentoring and payment checks.
Finally, CITB highlighted its modernised online grant portal and the Go Construct Careers platform, both intended to make recruitment, careers engagement and grant access more frictionless for employers.
Dylan Skelhorn
Dylan Skelhorn’s contribution to the 2025 FASET AGM cut through the agenda with a clarity that only lived experience can bring. Speaking not as a theorist but as someone who has paid the price of failure in full, Dylan recounted the day in June 2011 when a routine chimney-service job became life-altering. Standing on a stack that collapsed beneath him, he fell head-first down a pitched roof, knocked an unsecured ladder away and dropped more than 33 feet onto a brick wall. The injuries were catastrophic; a pelvis broken on both sides, fractured ribs and a punctured lung. What followed was not a dramatic recovery arc, but the slow, permanent re-drawing of a life.
Dylan described the daily reality since; severe chronic pain managed only through a constant regimen of medication, the loss of the physical career he had trained for, and the quiet, grinding impact on family and friends who have had to adjust alongside him. His message was delivered without self-pity. Instead, it was a stark reminder that “one moment” on site is never just one moment; it casts a shadow for decades.
His advice to the room was simple, and unsettling in its logic: never normalise shortcuts, never trust what you have not checked, and never assume a job is safe because it feels familiar. The industry’s standards exist to stop stories like his being repeated. Dylan’s story made that truth impossible to ignore.
Nationwide Safety – Excellence of Work Award Winner
Nationwide Safety is a FASET-accredited UK specialist in safety netting, edge protection and temporary access systems, operating nationwide from its Oxfordshire base. The team designs out risk through collective fall-protection solutions delivered to audited FASET and BS EN standards, with rigorous training and inspection at the core. Their Excellence of Work Award reflected outstanding performance on a complex, high-risk project, combining innovation, meticulous planning and exemplary client satisfaction.
We were also delighted to recognise Prodek Safety Systems who were highly commended for their customer satisfaction ratings.
Congratulations to both organisations of their standout work.
TRAD UK – Health, Safety and Environmental Award Winner
TRAD UK is a leading UK height-safety and scaffolding specialist, delivering temporary edge protection, safety netting and access solutions nationwide. Its safety culture is anchored in the Group’s Personal Engagement Programme, relentless training investment and clear operational standards, evidenced by over one million work hours without a lost-time injury. These sustained results and a sector-leading HSEQW campaign, made TRAD UK a compelling winner of FASET’s Health, Safety and Environmental Achievement Award.
Congratulations to Trad UK on winning this important industry award.
John Walsh – Outstanding Achievement of the Year Award
Safety Net Services is a long-established FASET-accredited specialist in safety netting, edge protection and temporary access, operating nationwide from its Aberystwyth base since 1998. The company is recognised for technical rigour, directly employed and BS EN-trained rigging teams and a visible commitment to driving standards across the sector.
John Walsh is a worthy Outstanding Achievement winner because his contribution goes beyond any single project. As a founding member of FASET, he helped build the Association’s professional and training foundations and has remained a leading advocate for competence, compliance and collective fall protection throughout his career. The award rightly acknowledges sustained industry leadership, service to the membership and an unwavering focus on keeping people safe at height.
Congratulations John, your dedication and service to our sector is a beacon. Please note, John was not available on the evening of the awards ceremony being away on business. His colleague, Dafydd Richards, collected the award on John’s behalf.
Scott Anderson – Team Member of the Year Award
One Stop Safety Solutions Limited is a FASET-accredited specialist in temporary safety systems, with more than two decades’ experience delivering safety netting, edge protection and work-at-height solutions across the UK. The firm’s model is built on directly employed, CSCS-FASET trained riggers, strong pre-construction planning and a technical advisory approach that gives clients confidence from design through installation.
The judges’ decision to name Scott Anderson Team Member of the Year reflects the kind of professional influence that lifts standards quietly but decisively. Scott is known for a collaborative, can-do approach on site and in the planning stages; he brings teams together, shares knowledge without ego and helps newer colleagues raise their game. His hard work and tenacity show in the details, whether that is solving problems early, maintaining discipline under pressure, or ensuring work is delivered precisely to standard when conditions are at their most demanding. In short, he embodies the competence, consistency and positive leadership that FASET exists to promote, making him a thoroughly worthy winner of this award.
We would also like to congratulate Tomas Macevicius who was highly commended in this category.
We were absolutely thrilled that FASET’s AGM was shortlisted for Best Longstanding Association Event at the 2025 national Trade Association and Association Excellence Awards, staged at the QEII Conference Centre in London in November 2025.
In a field crowded with some of the country’s largest, best-resourced trade bodies, that shortlisting placed our AGM in the top tier of association events nationwide for quality, impact and delivery.
For an organisation of FASET’s size, this recognition is more than a trophy moment. It is a signal that a small, focused federation, built on competence and purpose, can stand shoulder to shoulder with the UK’s biggest associations and be judged on equal terms. We do not compete on scale, we compete on standards; and this shortlisting is evidence that when the programme is strong, the stewardship disciplined, and the member value unmistakable, size ceases to be the deciding factor.
Put simply, the industry has noticed what our members already know – FASET’s AGM is a powerful reminder of what the association can deliver when it brings its expertise, its energy and its collective ambition into one room.
Entertainment – Mark Watson, Comedian
Mark Watson brought exactly the right energy to the FASET celebration dinner, setting a confident tone for the evening from his first line. A well-established figure on the UK comedy circuit, Mark is known for sharp observational humour, quick improvisation and a warm, conversational style that makes even a large room feel like a shared chat.
Across two decades of stage and broadcast work, he has built a reputation as one of Britain’s most reliable live performers, with regular appearances on prime-time and panel television, and a long fringe pedigree of acclaimed shows. His set was smart, generous and perfectly pitched for the audience; funny without ever being cheap, and paced with the timing of someone who knows how to carry a room.
In short, Mark’s wit and ease gave the dinner a flying start, keeping guests fully engaged, lifting the atmosphere and helping turn the tenth-anniversary celebrations into a genuinely memorable night.
Organisers
We’d like to thank the team from Seddon Management Services for arranging and managing the event so superbly. We are grateful to Tony, Becky, Duncan and Nicola for their meticulous planning and hard work throughout.
Event Gallery
Please click on the image to reveal the full gallery of pictures from the FASET AGM and Celebration Event 2025.
Our Sponsors
We would like to thank our fantastic sponsors, without whom the FASET AGM and celebration event would not be possible…thank you!
