Features

The consultants market has had its troubles this year but there are firms winning significant business. White Young Green tops April’s league table with involvement in two contracts worth a total of £52m.

The wins provide some good news for WYG at a tough time for the firm, which has cut 324 jobs this year and is expected to close another five offices before the end of 2009.

The company had already announced the closure of seven regional offices and carried out a pre-Christmas cull which saw 235 positions lost from what was a 3,000-strong workforce.

That said, the group is expected to announce a full-year pre-tax profit – excluding exceptional costs – of some £12 million.

Second placed AECOM, recently rebranded in the UK from Faber Maunsell, won £45m’s worth of contracts in April. AECOM had acquired Oscar Faber, which was formed in 1921, in 2001 and merged it with Maunsell in 2002. AECOM is followed in the monthly table by Couch Perry & Wilkes with £44m and RPS with £40m.



In the rolling annual total table, WSP is top dog with £654.2m, followed by Hoare Lea with £480m, Max Fordham (£431.9m), AECOM (£404.1m) and Arup (£342.5m).

Consultants are further worried by exposure to the sharp downturn in building work in the United Arab Emirates, with troubled developers such as Dubai’s Nakheel looking to drastically cut already agreed fees with its suppliers, who are often consultants from the UK.

The Association for Consultancy and Engineering called for government action to support these firms.

ACE chief executive Nelson Ogunshakin said: “There is a staggering amount of unpaid fees, which our soundings indicate are around £400m.”

ACE has written to the business secretary Lord Mandelson as well as UK Trade and Investment and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) to seek official backing for firms trying to recover cash.