2026 has been a difficult year for groundworks contractors. Specialised construction activities, the category that covers groundworks, roofing and other installation trades, made up the largest share of the 3,805 construction insolvencies recorded in England and Wales in the twelve months to June 2026, a figure around 18 per cent above pre pandemic levels. Thin margins, late payment and rising financing costs have been consistently cited across the trade press as the causes behind a run of contractor failures this year.
For a trade that already carries some of the highest physical risk in construction, that level of commercial pressure is worth pausing on. Cost pressure on a business is never a reason to lower the standard of protection on site, and the two need to stay completely separate.
Trench and Excavation Safety Doesn’t Flex With the Market
Whatever pressure a business is under commercially, the legal duty to protect people working in and around excavations does not change. The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 require excavations to be adequately supported and properly edged to prevent people, plant and materials falling in, regardless of programme or budget pressure.
Falls from height remain the leading cause of workplace death in Great Britain, accounting for 31 of all worker fatalities in 2025/26, around a quarter of the total, and construction recorded 25 deaths over the same period, according to the Health and Safety Executive’s latest annual figures. Excavation collapse carries the same fundamental risk profile as a fall: unsupported ground can give way without warning, and there is very little time to react once it does. That is exactly why edge protection standards on trenches exist, and why they are worth holding to even when a job is under strain elsewhere.
What Compliant Trench Edge Protection Should Look Like
The Rapid-EPS TrenchGuard range is built around the same Rapid Panel used across the rest of the product line, and is compliant with BS EN 13374:2025, OSHA 1926.502 and other global standards. The TrenchGuard Post (TG004) delivers heavy duty trench edge protection at 2.5 metre fixing centres, while the Collapsible Ladder Platform (TG007) gives operatives a safe, controlled way in and out of an open trench, a point of risk that is easy to overlook when access is being improvised under time pressure.
A key part of the range is how it attaches to equipment already on site. The Telescopic Sheet/Box Clamp (TG036), Telescopic TrenchGuard Sheet/Box Clamp (TG049) and Trench Sheet Clamp (TG002) fix edge protection directly onto trench sheets and boxes rather than requiring separate groundwork, so protection can move with the excavation as it progresses without extra fixings, extra time, or extra people. On a programme with less margin for error and fewer hands to do things twice, that matters.
Choosing Equipment and a Supplier You Can Rely On
In a market where contractors can come and go quickly, the reliability of the equipment protecting a trench, and of the business supplying it, matters just as much as the specification on paper. Rapid-EPS designs and supplies from three UK facilities and a production site in Porto, Portugal, so distributors and hire companies can offer groundworks contractors consistent stock, support and lead times regardless of wider market conditions.
The Bottom Line
Cost pressure across groundworks is real and well documented, but an unsupported excavation does not know or care what a contractor’s margins look like. The protection installed on a trench has to meet the same standard every time, on every job, whatever else is happening in the market around it.
To talk through trench and excavation protection for an upcoming groundworks package, or to find out about stocking the TrenchGuard range as a distributor, get in touch with the Rapid-EPS team.
