23 October 2025
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Michael Smart speaks at the launch flanked by, from left, Dean Skerratt, Vanessa Bradshaw, Andrew Forest, Graeme Fox, James Bailey, Lee Downham and Howard Noble
A new society has been launched with the aim of representing engineers and installers across the refrigeration, air conditioning and heat pump sectors.
The Refrigeration & Air Conditioning Engineers Society (RACES) is the brainchild of engineer Michael Smart and Graeme Fox, F-Gas Schemes Director at the F-Gas Register. The co-founders say it has been created “for the people who do the work: installers, service engineers, design and sales engineers, educators, students and more’’.
Smart, who has spent nine years in the RACHP sector since leaving the Army, said: “I was frustrated by the lack of representation that ordinary refrigeration engineers had in the industry from the existing bodies. Ordinary engineers felt they needed a different approach to representation and I reached out to Graeme to help me turn this dream into a reality.”
RACES believes a key role will be to support small businesses to develop the skills needed to prepare for the wider transition to alternative refrigerants. It says it has an up-to-date technical library already in place and plans to hold training courses across the UK.
Fox, a former Institute of Refrigeration President, said: “The industry these days has a huge majority of small and micro businesses operating as contractors – over 90% of contractors have less than five engineers per company – that’s a massive change in the demographic from where we were 30 years ago when I learned my trade. The requirement to send your engineers away for even one or two day courses presents a comparatively huge financial and operational strain on small businesses as against the traditional larger contractors, and we have set out to provide free or reduced-cost access to the kind of training courses these engineers will be needing in the coming years.”
Billed as a society for engineers and led by engineers, RACES says it aims to represent the estimated 80–85% of the market made up of small firms and self-employed engineers, often those “in vans doing the job day in, day out”. The group intends to bridge the gap between existing trade bodies and those at grassroots level by:
- Providing a unified voice for working engineers
- Offering access to training and continuous professional development
- Hosting networking and social events
- Creating an online hub of technical information and manufacturer resources
A not-for-profit organisation, RACES offers membership fees from £65. It is backed by an advisory board drawn from a cross-section of the industry. In addition to the co-founders, the board includes Lee Downham and Howard Noble (Beijer Ref UK), Dean Skerratt (Wolseley Group), Vanessa Bradshaw and Andrea Burton (Derbyshire Refrigeration), Samantha Parris (Wave Refrigeration), Andrew Fraser (Forest Group), James Bailey (Omega Solutions) and Gregory Pelling (Miramar Engineering).
Howard Noble, Innovation & Marketing Director at founding sponsor Beijer Ref UK, said: “The Beijer Ref Academy is pleased to support the development of RACES. The founding principles of the society are aligned with our own passion to support engineers through training.”
The session concluded with an invitation for members and businesses to get involved through membership, sponsorship, partnerships, hosting events, or contributing ideas and literature. The overall message was one of unity and optimism: a collective effort to strengthen and professionalise the refrigeration and air conditioning workforce from the ground up.
