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The skills crisis has deepened. Retention is as important as recruitment. Organisations are losing skilled people to competitors and struggling to develop replacements fast enough. The apprenticeship pipeline is fragile, and new entrants are being absorbed into reactive cultures before they have a chance to develop proactive habits.

Reactive maintenance remains the dominant operating mode across UK industry despite universal acknowledgement that it is costly, unsafe, and unsustainable. The barrier is not knowledge. It’s culture, incentives, and leadership continuity.

The relationship between operations and maintenance surfaced as one of the most consequential divides in 2026, with practitioners describing maintenance as a “necessary evil” – celebrated when assets run, blamed when they fail, defunded when things are quiet. Yet where organisations have merged teams under shared KPIs or introduced Asset Manager roles, the divide measurably narrows.

Data quality, system integration, and analytical capability remain severe constraints. Organisations have more data than ever but less confidence in what it tells them. The gap between data collection and actionable insight shows no sign of closing despite the plethora of AI and other emerging tech and platforms.

Planning, scheduling, backlog management, and work order discipline continue to deteriorate. Many organisations lack dedicated planners, operate without documented work management processes, and cannot answer basic questions about their maintenance backlog.

A new framing has emerged: obsolescence, not age, is the primary risk driver. Control system obsolescence in particular is creating multi-million replacement liabilities that organisations are deferring into an ever-growing bow wave of investment need.

Maintenance continues to be viewed as a cost centre by the majority of C-suite executives and leadership. Short-term financial pressures, leadership turnover, and an inability to articulate maintenance value in financial language keep the function underfunded and underrepresented at board level.

AI and predictive analytics dominate conference agendas and vendor pitches, but practitioners report confusion about what AI actually is, scepticism about vendor claims, and frustration that the conversation has moved to advanced technology while the basics remain broken.

Newly elevated as a distinct obstacle. The inability to sustain improvement is now recognised as a change management failure, not a technical one. Maintenance leaders are increasingly expected to be part politician, part coach, and part influencer – a role for which most have received no formal training.

The retirement wave has arrived. Organisations face the simultaneous loss of technical knowledge, asset history, and operational judgement that took decades to accumulate and exists nowhere in any system.

Reliability engineering remains under-recognised as a discipline in the UK, with no clear career pathway, limited professional standing, and frequent confusion between condition monitoring techniques and a true reliability mindset. 71% of respondents reported no dedicated reliability engineering function.

A new theme emerged from the 2026 face-to-face roundtables: the absence of a long-term, strategic view of assets is itself a root cause of many obstacles in this report. Without a documented asset strategy connecting maintenance decisions to capital investment, organisations remain locked in the backlog–reactivity–deferral spiral.