AGS Chair’s blog January 2025: safety, NQMS and piling roadmap takeaways for ground engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on AGS (UK) – Blog/Magazine
30 Second Briefing
AGS launches new Piling and Sustainability Roadmaps and confirms renewed collaboration with the British Drilling Association to target health and safety performance across geotechnical operations. The group backs wider adoption of the National Quality Mark Scheme (NQMS) in response to regulatory concerns over investigation and reporting quality, and flags upcoming technical events on cone penetration testing (29 January 2025) and effective procurement of ground investigations (26 March 2025). An in‑person AGS Annual Conference on 1 May 2025 will focus on “The Future” of ground engineering practice.
Technical Brief
- Response to “Thoughts from the regulatory front line” centres on SiLC and NQMS roles in auditability.
- Overall messaging pushes geotechnical firms towards formalised QA, carbon accounting and demonstrable competence in safety-critical tasks.
Our Take
With only a handful of Geotechnical stories in our coverage, repeated appearances by AGS and AGS Magazine signal that their standards work (such as AGS Piling and the Sustainability Roadmaps) is effectively setting the reference frame for UK ground investigation practice rather than just commenting on it.
The March AGS Magazine issue on women’s safety and wellbeing in geotechnics aligns with the safety emphasis behind events like ‘Effective Procurement of Ground Investigations’, suggesting that procurement guidance is likely to be read through a stronger lens of duty-of-care, PPE suitability and site welfare than in earlier AGS material.
The focus on ‘A Clients Guide to Cone Penetration Tests’ and NQMS-linked initiatives in this Chair’s update complements the November 2025 AGS Magazine coverage of historical soil data and environmental disputes, indicating that AGS is trying to close the loop from investigation specification through data quality to defensible interpretation in contentious projects.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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