There is evidence of skills pressure, but it does not support a blanket claim that every HVAC occupation or local contractor is short of labour. BESA’s 2026 labour-market summary reports that 66% of employers face ongoing shortages of skilled installation and maintenance personnel and that 75% identify apprentices and trainees as the hardest roles to recruit. Its scope is building-services engineering, broader than this desk’s local HVAC audience. (thebesa.com)
A different perspective appears in the Migration Advisory Committee’s 23 July 2026 Temporary Shortage List report: for air-conditioning and refrigeration installers and repairers, it found no signs of historical shortage in the data, while recognising substantial forecast future demand relative to the occupation’s size. This is a different population and methodology, not a direct rebuttal of every employer reporting recruitment difficulty. (gov.uk)
Buyer conclusion: use national evidence as context, then verify the company’s actual bottleneck. Neither a trade-body survey nor a national occupational assessment establishes that your office should buy AI.
Trade coverage also documents investment in attracting technical talent: Cooling Post’s 6 March 2026 report covered BESA’s refrigeration and air-conditioning WorldSkills recruitment initiative. That supports a training-and-capability interpretation, not a claim about agency spending. (coolingpost.com)
For qualitative background, the Off The Job interview with Lincoln Smith covers the experience of scaling Custom Heat. It is useful for generating owner-interview questions, but is older material and is not used here to establish salary bands, current vacancy counts or automation returns. (offthejobpodcast.buzzsprout.com)
Sources cited on this page
- thebesa.com ↗www.thebesa.com
- gov.uk ↗www.gov.uk
- coolingpost.com ↗www.coolingpost.com
- offthejobpodcast.buzzsprout.com ↗offthejobpodcast.buzzsprout.com