AIB Solutions wins the ARCA Gold Training Award 2026

What the award recognises

The Asbestos Removal Contractors Association (ARCA) is the trade body for licensed asbestos contractors in the UK. Each year its Training and Competency Committee recognises members whose teams have gone beyond the minimum when it comes to training.

The bar is deliberately high. To qualify, a contractor needs at least eight people to have trained with ARCA on supervisor or operative courses during the year, and those people need to have averaged 92.5% or higher across all of them. Not the best result — the average, across everyone.

"It is not an easy award to win, and that is rather the point. Nobody drifts into it. It means your people did not just turn up, they learned it."— ARCA Training & Competency Committee

Sixty-six ARCA members met that standard this year. AIB Solutions is one of them, and the award was formally recognised at the ARCA AGM on 2 October 2026.

Why it matters if you're hiring an asbestos contractor

Most of what makes asbestos removal safe happens where you can't see it: how the enclosure is built, how the air is managed, how the waste is handled, how the team behaves when something unexpected turns up. All of that comes down to training.

As a client you can't easily check how well a contractor trains its people. An HSE licence tells you a company is permitted to do the work. ARCA membership tells you it's signed up to the industry's standards. The Gold Training Award tells you something more specific: that this year, the people on this team sat the courses, passed them, and scored highly across the board. If you're weighing up contractors, here's what to look for.

Thank you to the team

This one belongs to the people on the tools. Every course sat, every score earned, every job done properly under the licence. The award carries the company name, but it was earned by the team — and we're proud of every one of them.

Frequently asked questions