Ranking itself as one of the top five support services suppliers in the UK, Amey celebrates its centenary this year. The company was founded in 1921 by William Charles Amey as a quarrying business, but today provides a range of construction, consultancy, maintenance, facilities management and design services.
First a quick history. Amey was publicly listed in 1963, purchased by Spanish-based, multinational infrastructure services company Ferrovial in 2003, and in 2019 consolidated and restructured after it was adversely impacted by a 25-year PFI highways contract agreed with Birmingham City Council.
In 2019, Ferrovial stated its intention to sell all or parts of the business, but it was later withdrawn from the market. As of this year Amey is up for sale again having revived its fortunes thanks in part to new CEO, Amanda Fisher.
Market analysts believe that it is more likely to be purchased as a whole rather than split up. An Amey spokesperson said: "The value in Amey is the synergy between its operational business and its consultancy business, which can deliver innovations in technology. Normal consultants don’t have such a heritage in operational infrastructure improvements."
Environment and sustainability
Oliver Treasure, Amey Consulting’s project director of environment and sustainability, explains that the 100-strong E&S unit – part of the Amey Consulting 1,800-strong division – began in 2014, drawing together internal specialists, in response to contracts increasingly needing environmental support.
Graduating in civil engineering from Nottingham University in 2006, he has worked for Amey for 14 years, a period in which environmental and ecological impacts have taken an increasing priority. From his home in Ealing he manages a 100-strong E&S team, normally based in offices in London, Birmingham, York, Manchester, Crawley, Belfast and Motherwell. Often close collaboration is required in projects with Amey’s head of social value, Emily Davies.
The team works across the Amey portfolio. He explains that, on a big project such as the A66 trans-pennine road upgrade or the A96 in Scotland, "my team will run all the environmental input, such as the environmental impact assessments (EIAs) and public consultation for development consent orders (DCO)."
He adds: "We have taken on contracts such as tree planting design for HS2 and we also work around prisons and prison operations for the MoJ. Prisons are generally rural and have green estates around them. This too can involve ecology work."
Amey’s contracts are becoming larger as the nations of the UK embark on ambitious infrastructure investment. He predicts that his team’s service will increasingly be offered to external clients, moving beyond Amey’s traditional public sector base.
He says: "Amey Consulting is a healthy and growing business, particularly in the infrastructure market, which has always been the traditional heart of our work and in which we can call on our knowledge of construction. We are delivering well and have been for a long time. We're winning lots of good work."
So what is the team’s unique selling point? He responds: "Amey’s expertise in construction and delivering front line services means our practical approach to consultancy sets us apart from our competitors. We are extremely well known to our main clients, Network Rail, Highways England and local authorities. We have proved to them time and time again that we can deliver, coming up with innovative solutions."
Innovation in rail and road
A good example of Amey Consulting’s innovation, he says, is its growing role in rail investment and management. In Wales, in a £5bn contract which began in 2018, Amey is delivering a major project for the Welsh government and Transport for Wales, which is designed to incorporate environmental and social objectives.
Last October, the Welsh government announced that Welsh rail services would come back into public ownership, reversing the privatisation of the mid-1990s. Under a new system, the Wales and Border franchise, which includes most of the country’s network, was transferred in February to publicly-owned Transport for Wales Rail Ltd.
National ownership allows vertical rail integration, which is not possible on the privately-run networks in the rest of the UK, under which a single organisation both manages improvements to track infrastructure and runs trains services. In this case, a joint venture of Amey and Keolis has been contracted by TfWR to deliver rail upgrades, including track doubling, electrification and new signaling and to create a new metro-style light rail service in the Welsh valleys. Amey Keolis is also the operational manager of trains and stations.
As part of the contract, Amey Consulting is carrying out impact assessments to facilitate rainwater harvesting and solar energy generation around stations – thereby reducing the carbon impact of the rail system. Treasure says of the Wales and Border contract: "Essentially it’s a much more efficient way to work, when the company that runs the trains also upgrades and manages the infrastructure."
He predicts that such vertical integration may be more widely introduced in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, if further parts of the network come back into public ownership. But he comments: "It does depend what the impact of COVID-19 will be on the rail sector as a whole and what contracting models will best serve the changing demands on the rail network."
In another example of innovation, Amey Consulting delivered the UK’s first carbon neutral road improvement scheme for Highway England (EA 23-Feb-21). The project, which involved repairing and resurfacing the A590 dual carriageway in Cumbria, drew on the expertise of Amey Consulting’s carbon modelling experts.
Measures to reduce carbon included using site batched cold recycled asphalt to reduce HGV movements, a shortened construction programme and using solar powered generators and electric vehicles on site. The measures, which are certain to be repeated in other road improvement schemes, saved approximately 70 tonnes of CO2e.
Brexit and COVID-19 drive change
With construction companies adopting lower carbon solutions, and social value criteria increasingly being added to public procurement contracts (EA 16-Mar-21), companies that can offer multidisciplinary expertise are likely to benefit from the desire to ‘build back better’.
Treasure comments: "I think it’s really great to see that number 10 is putting focus on the green industrial revolution (EA 23-Nov-20). The funding and budgets devoted to national programmes are starting to reflect that."
Central and local government policies, he points out, have been main drivers for reducing carbon and increasing environmental standards in the last 15 years. It will be possible for companies like Amey to transfer the lessons that they have learnt from these clients to the private sector.
He adds: "It will be interesting to see the role that Brexit has on UK environmental policy. There has certainly been a perception in the construction sector that some policies originating from Brussels have added inefficiency and slowed things down – the approach taken with great crested newts is a high profile example.
"We now have an opportunity to have a more tailored UK-centred approach on protecting our natural capital and I hope that we do that. Whatever the decision is on protecting endangered species, we need to make sure that the bar is kept high."
Noting that promises to simplify planning procedures and streamline EIA (EA 31-Jul-20) have been delayed by other political imperatives, he says: "The government rightly focused on Brexit and COVID-19 but I think that it’s really important that we see some policy statements released on these topics in the next twelve months, to provide sign posting on what we can expect."
He adds: "Brexit can either be seen as a threat or an opportunity. As an industry, we need to make sure that the government takes hold of the opportunity that it presents by applying pressure and lobbying. If we view environmental protection simply as red tape then we will significantly harm the UK’s natural capital."
And what about COVID-19 and the workplace of the future? He says: "I think that there are actually some massive positives to home working. It would be very easy for someone in my job to spend my whole life in trains, planes and cars. I really hope that we won’t be going back to that. We need to be smarter in the way that we do business."
Perhaps using teams and zoom calls through all the stages of planning, designing and delivering a project will become the new normal (EA 10-Mar-21). If this takes root across all businesses, it’s even possible that the M1, which Amey helped to build more than 60 years ago, will become a lot less busy.