In an increasingly complex geopolitical and climate landscape, the need to adapt has never been more critical. Our customers and the communities they serve are facing growing pressures around operational resilience, energy security and long-term performance. Our role is to help them navigate this uncertainty with practical, evidence-based solutions that provide certainty, value and measurable results.
Throughout 2025, we expanded the products, services and materials we offer to support customers through this transition. By combining innovative technologies with more sustainable construction methods, we’re helping customers deliver assets that meet their sustainability expectations, reducing emissions, waste and environmental impact.
Here, we showcase some of the solutions helping customers overcome the key barriers on their path to net zero, accelerating progress, improving outcomes and reducing the climate impacts of their buildings.
Energy Synergy ®
We developed our AI-enabled Energy Synergy® service to help customers optimise building performance in use, reducing both carbon emissions and operational costs.
At a time when energy costs and security are under increasing pressure, the service gives users the ability to surface insights from their energy data, identify inefficiencies, and make informed decisions with confidence.
Energy Synergy® monitors all building energy uses, including heating, cooling and a range of environmental data to optimise building performance and user comfort. By comparing projected energy usage against actual performance, customers can identify and resolve issues in real time, and fine-tune controls, systems and usage accordingly.
The impact is significant. Projects with 12 months or more of monitoring are averaging 15% better than predicted performance, cutting the typical industry gap by nearly half.
Of the 22 projects where the service is in use 70% reported no performance gap after 12 months of monitoring. In 2025, Energy Synergy® delivered 1.9GWh of energy savings, £600,000 in reduced costs, and avoided 385 tonnes of CO₂e, across a portfolio now covering £1.27bn of projects.
Individual results highlight the scale of improvement:
Bassaleg School, in Newport, Wales, is outperforming its target by 21%, saving 327,000 kWh, 65 tonnes CO₂e and nearly £100,000 annually — a 7:1 return on the cost of the service.
Tarleton Academy, in Preston, the UK’s first net zero carbon academy, is delivering 29% energy savings, avoiding 33.5 tonnes of CO₂e and saving £50,000 per year.
At the University of Warwick’s Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Building, three years of monitoring have cut energy use by 12%, removing 49,051 kg CO₂e annually.
Eclipse Leisure Centre, in Staines-upon-Thames, the world’s largest Passivhaus leisure centre, is already operating with an EUI well below the UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard threshold.
The service is also supporting buildings with specialist user needs, including Hopescourt SEND School, in Walton-on-Thames, where it is helping optimise comfort and carbon performance for pupils with complex requirements.
Innovation is accelerated through our partnership with CoolPlanet. Their AI‑powered platform automates inefficiency detection, identifies energy‑saving strategies across portfolios and allows projects to be benchmarked from design stage onward. This takes performance evaluation by Energy Synergy® well beyond traditional building management system capability.
By offering expert insight rather than dashboards alone, we aim to give customers a reliable, scalable way to improve real-world building performance and to raise the bar for accountability across the industry.
Architecture and Technical Design
Formerly known as Collida, Architecture and Technical Design is Willmott Dixon’s in‑house design and standardisation team.
The team bring deep sector experience and deliver everything from robust, thermally modelled 1:5 details to fully designed platforms that support customers with recurring requirements – such as on the Department for Education framework.
They played a key role in delivering the Passivhaus‑certified Palomar Court in Barking and Dagenham, where a design‑for‑manufacture approach reduced embodied carbon and achieved Willmott Dixon’s highest ever airtightness performance.
The Architectural & Technical Design team delivered an industry first in 2025, conducting fire testing of Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT). This informed the creation of standard cavity barrier applications, positioning Willmott Dixon at the forefront of CLT expertise.
Decarbonise Today
Decarbonise Today provides a true end-to-end delivery solution, turning net zero goals into measurable decarbonisation projects. From estate-wide assessments and investment-grade proposals to securing external funding and managing delivery on the ground, we provide customers with a clear decarbonisation pathway, maximising carbon reductions, cost efficiencies, and long-term sustainability.
In 2025, we were named a supplier on the £500m NHS Shared Business Services Decarbonisation of Estates Framework, enabling us to scale our retrofit and building performance expertise across the NHS estate.
We successfully secured and mobilised a major decarbonisation programme across three leisure centres, progressing rapidly from funding approval through detailed design and into on‑site delivery for North Herts District Council.
The project delivers a comprehensive package of high‑impact fabric, building services and renewable energy measures, driving clear and measurable reductions in carbon emissions across the estate. These measures represent a step change in building performance, delivering anticipated annual carbon savings of 1,342tCO₂e across the leisure facilities. The programme demonstrates tangible progress towards the council's net zero ambitions while significantly improving the efficiency, resilience and long‑term sustainability of its leisure estate.
Offsite construction/Modern Methods of Construction (MMC)
At Willmott Dixon, we use MMC to save time and cost, while improving quality and promoting greater sustainability. We have extensive experience of off-site construction, prefabrication, and modular construction, working with trusted supply chain partners who fabricate the product components in factories, and specialist contractors who have the expertise to assemble them on site.
In 2025, key components manufactured off-site include light gauge steel frames, with windows and EPDM roofing installed, factory assembled bathrooms and prefabricated and precast concrete.
We use precast concrete to improve quality, reduce waste and create greater certainty in delivery. We work in partnership with PCE, our approved precast cell provider, to deliver our ‘CODE’ pre‑designed custodial model through a highly engineered “kit of parts” approach.
Our Cambridgeshire South Police Station (right) project shows how this works in practice.
Through early design engagement, BIM Level 2 coordination and careful logistics planning our team has been able to maintain a tight programme that meets demanding security and operational requirements at the new £38.5 million, 24-cell custody facility.
Because components are precision-engineered before arriving on site, the approach supports rapid assembly, reduces disruption, waste and site activity, and provides customers with greater confidence in cost and programme. The high quality of the precast finish also reduces the need for additional internal linings and finishing materials, helping to shorten programme durations and deliver long-term value.
Digital Construction
We are a digitally enabled business, embedding technology across our operations to enhance quality, efficiency and value for our customers. Our people and supply chain partners use digital tools and data-led processes to improve decision-making, streamline delivery and support more sustainable outcomes. This approach also strengthens safety performance and enables a more agile, responsive service throughout the project lifecycle.
Our business operates within the UK Information Management Framework, aligned to the ISO 19650 series and associated UK guidance. This provides a consistent and auditable approach to the creation, management and exchange of information across our teams, partners and customers. By applying clear information requirements, defined responsibilities and controlled workflows, we ensure project information is accurate, accessible, secure and reliable at every stage of delivery.
We apply Building Information Modelling (BIM) as a core delivery methodology, using coordinated 3D digital models to create accurate representations of physical and functional building characteristics. This enables all stakeholders involved in design, construction and operation to collaborate effectively, identify issues earlier and reduce inefficiencies before they impact programme or cost.
Through the effective use of BIM, Common Data Environments (CDE), and robust information management processes, we improve programme certainty, enhance cost control and deliver better project outcomes. Our approach ensures that information is generated, reviewed and exchanged to defined standards, providing a reliable golden thread of asset data that supports handover, operation and whole-life asset management long after project completion.
In 2025, we took a significant step forward in digital construction moving to a digital-embedded culture. We standardised our digital delivery approach across more than 110 live projects nationally, connecting site data, collaborative planning, project information and compliance checks through a single common data environment (Dalux), which is now active across 204 projects with 417 supply chain partners trained within the platform. Information management reports that previously required five days to compile now take four hours using live project data, while design coordination and clash reporting has been reduced from three days to two hours per stage.
Across the first 18 projects adopting this model, over 3,950 hours have been released back into delivery teams — equivalent to 20,200 hours of annual delivery capacity across our live portfolio, created through process standardisation rather than additional resource.
Compliance performance on Department for Education projects increased from an average of 83% to 100% against Technical Adviser information management checks, and average Net Promoter Scores improved from 88% to 91%, reflecting more consistent and predictable delivery.
Applying the Building Safety Act Golden Thread across every project — not just Higher Risk Buildings — this enterprise-wide cultural shift has embedded digital ownership within operational teams, creating a scalable, repeatable model that improves productivity, programme certainty and customer confidence across every project, sector and location.
The Yellow Book
Willmott Dixon’s Yellow Book is our design and build manual. It brings together our collective knowledge and resources in one place to give our people and our supply chain partners access to all our combined knowledge when it comes to designing and constructing the perfect product. The positive impact of the Yellow Book is evidenced by the quality of our end-product, a reduction in the cost of rectifying errors and ultimately reducing business risk.
Most recently, this has been coupled with our new Architecture and Technical Design service, which translates this learning into solutions that our consultants and project teams can directly deploy.