Pyramid Eco has asked The Installation Assurance Authority to inspect 100% of our high-risk retrofit installations. Not a sample of them. All of them.
This is a voluntary commitment. Nobody asked us to do it, no funder requires it, and no framework demands it. We have gone to our certification body and asked them to come and check every single high-risk measure we install, and we are paying for the privilege.
We think it should become the industry standard. Here is why we have done it, what it changes, and what it means if you are the organisation buying retrofit.
What we have committed to
Under normal certification arrangements, an installer’s work is subject to risk-based surveillance. A proportion of installations get an on-site visit from an inspector. That proportion is set by the standard and by the certification body’s assessment of risk, and for a competent installer with a clean record it is a modest sample of the total.
We have replaced that sample with everything.
Before the end of each month, we give the IAA our full forward programme: which projects are running, where they are, what measures are going in and when each one will be at the stage where it can be meaningfully inspected. The IAA allocates inspector days against that programme. Their inspectors attend, they see the work in progress and on completion, and their findings come back to us and sit on the project record.
The commitment covers our high-risk measures, which for us means external wall insulation and internal wall insulation. That is where the technical risk genuinely sits, and it is where things go wrong most expensively when they do go wrong. Other measures come into scope as the programme develops.
We have built the scheduling around the IAA’s availability specifically so that 100% verification does not become 100% delay. Being checked more often should not mean building more slowly, and the IAA put real work into making sure it does not.
Two things are worth saying plainly about how this runs. We absorb the cost. It is not passed on to clients and it does not sit anywhere in our pricing. And although this is a partnership we value, the IAA are not pulling any punches. They inspect our jobs exactly as they would inspect anybody else’s, and we would not want it any other way. An audit we could lean on would be worth nothing to you.
Why we are doing this
The retrofit industry has a trust problem, and we are part of that industry.
In October 2025 the National Audit Office published its review of energy efficiency installations delivered under ECO4 and the Great British Insulation Scheme. Of the homes it examined with external wall insulation, 98% required major repairs. For internal wall insulation the figure was 29%. A share of those cases presented immediate health and safety risks. The NAO’s conclusion was not that a handful of rogue installers slipped through, but that the oversight system itself was too complex, too fragmented and carried insufficient audit and monitoring to catch what was happening. Some installers, the report found, were able to game it by moving between certification bodies.
That review covered ECO4 and Great British Insulation Scheme delivery and did not break its findings down by tenure, so nobody should read it as a verdict on social housing programmes specifically. We will not pretend otherwise. But the damage to confidence does not respect the distinction. Every asset manager, every council retrofit lead and every resident who has read that coverage now has a reasonable question in their head: how do I actually know this installation was done properly?
The honest answer, for most of the sector, is that you do not. You have a certificate, a warranty and a sample-based audit trail. What you do not have is somebody independent standing in front of the actual wall on the actual house.
We would rather you did not have to take our word for it. And we would rather find a problem ourselves, while the scaffolding is still up, than have somebody find it for us in five years’ time.
There is nothing selfless about that. We intend to still be here in ten years, and we would like the work we are doing today to still be standing behind us then, rather than sitting on somebody’s remediation list.
What this looks like on site
The IAA audit is the final layer, not the only one. It sits on top of a process we had already been tightening for some time:
- A pre-installation site visit before work is scoped and priced
- A full walkaround with the site manager before the measure starts
- Retrofit coordinators attending high-risk measures on site a minimum of two times, not signing off from a desk
- System manufacturers invited on site to inspect installation of their own products
- In-house site management, and trusted, experienced installation teams who have worked with us for years
- And now, an independent IAA inspector on every external and internal wall insulation installation
That is several separate sets of eyes on the work before the certification body’s inspector arrives, and it is deliberate. A single point of assurance is a single point of failure. The measures we install are going into homes where people live, in many cases people who did not choose the works and cannot easily escape them if they go wrong. That deserves more than one check.
None of this is a sudden change of heart. We have never hidden our projects or tried to duck an inspection, and we have been arguing for this level of scrutiny since the early days of ECO4. In early 2025 we stopped installing EPS insulation altogether, ahead of most of the industry, because we did not believe it was the right choice for the homes we work on. Joining the IAA moved us on again. Every audit has taught us something, which is why this reads to us as the next logical step rather than a departure.
What it means if you are procuring retrofit
If you are a local authority, housing association or principal contractor putting retrofit work out to tender, this changes what you can expect from us in three practical ways.
You get independent evidence, not our own paperwork. Every high-risk installation on your programme carries an inspection record from a UKAS-accredited certification body that has no commercial interest in saying the work was fine.
Problems surface while they are still cheap. Verification during delivery catches issues at the point where they cost days, not at the point where they cost a remediation programme, a compensation claim and a very difficult conversation with your residents.
Your own assurance burden drops. Your clerk of works and your consultants are not the only line of defence on our sections of your programme. That is capacity you get back.
And if it would help, we are happy to show you the inspection records for any of our work, on any programme, at any stage. You should not have to take our word for it, and with this in place you do not have to.
If it is useful to anyone else
We are not claiming to be better than anybody else, and we are certainly not claiming to be perfect. We are not. There are a lot of good people having a very hard time in this industry at the moment and we have no interest in adding to it.
We would only say this. For a long time the sector treated audit as a cost to be kept down, and the honest reckoning is that all of us are paying for that now, the careful businesses alongside the careless ones. There was probably enough money in ECO for every installation to be physically inspected. It would have been a great deal cheaper than what came afterwards.
So if another installer is curious about whether this would work for them, we would be glad to share what we have learned, including the parts we have not got right yet. And our genuine thanks to Nigel Donohue and the team at the IAA, who could reasonably have told us this was too much hassle and instead put the work in to make it practical.
If enough of us end up doing something like this, the question of whether retrofit can be delivered to a consistent standard stops being an argument and becomes a matter of record. That would be good for clients, good for residents, and good for the long-term future of the measures we all want to keep installing.
Talk to us
If you are procuring retrofit in London or the South East and you want to see how 100% verification works in practice, we are happy to walk you through the process, the programme and the inspection records.
Pyramid Eco is the trading name of Pyramid Solution South East Limited, a TrustMark-registered, PAS 2030 and PAS 2035 certified retrofit contractor working across London, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex and the wider South East.
