Turnover and staff numbers up as T&T Alinea profits from new markets in debut year

The enlarged T&T Alinea cost management business is expected to post income of around £50m in its debut year of trading with staff numbers hitting the 400 mark.

The deal, which saw Turner & Townsend snap up the then 10-year-old business for an undisclosed sum, was completed at the beginning of last February, 18 months after talks between the pair first began.

In its last set of results before the deal was inked, Alinea said income in the year to April 2023 was £18m, a rise on the £15.6m it posted for the same period in 2022.

The director of T&T Alinea's London cost management business, Iain Parker, said the increase in turnover for the year to April 2024 will include more than £20m of revenue from the T&T business as well but added the rise was also a reflection of the new sectors the firm was now operating in.

He said these included more work in life sciences, which has doubled over the year to around 12% of its business, as well as increasing work in data centres, public sector, health, education and sports work where the All England Lawn Tennis club at Wimbledon is a long-standing client.

Before, around 60% of Alinea's workload came from London commercial but this market now accounts for around a quarter of business.

"[The deal] has allowed us to go into markets we weren't really in before," Parker said. "The diversity of sectors has allowed us to grow and we will continue to grow."

Staff numbers at the business have gone up from around 350 to 400 over the year and Parker said they are expected to grow 10% again over the next 12 months. Following the deal, the firm last summer moved its staff from Cannon Street to T&T's office at One New Change in the shadow of St Paul's Cathedral.

The firm's MEP team now stands at 60 people, which Parker said was the largest in London. He added: "The specialist skills teams, we really want to grow those because they give real value to clients." Last year T&T Alinea brought in new faces for its facades team and recruited former RLB partner Chris Trew as a director to work at its specialist services team, in particular infrastructure and utilities.