Annual Report 2024

At the very beginning of our financial year, we received the welcome news that we had been awarded our very first B Corporation certificate.  

This saw us join the ranks of some of the leading law firms and private banks in London, with an overall B Impact Score of 89.8:

We also achieved our highest ever PRIME Score of 19 - the highest out of every PRIME Member for the 2024-25 session.

It hasn't just been a year of scores, badges and accreditation, however. 2024 has been a particularly challenging year for construction in the UK - contractors who had panicked during the pandemic lockdowns priced work keenly in 2021-2022 to ensure that their pipelines were full.

Little could they have known that their already thin margins would be stretched to breaking before those jobs were even on site, by virtue of Brexit, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the enormous wage and material inflation that followed both.

This led to a spate of redundancies, both locally to us in the super-prime residential sector (in the form of Lansgrove, Beck, and Octagon), and nationally in the form of the collapse of ISG.

This has meant that 1,000's of construction companies have not been paid this year. Many of those non-payments are for retentions, which are sums that were retained by the contractors to ensure that their sub-contractors would finish their works (but otherwise amounted to certified, earned sums). The true extent of lost retention cannot yet reliably be set out, but it is likely to be in the £100m's.

With this in mind, we mobilised at relatively short notice to try and rally support for the thrice-failed reform of retentions.  In October, we launched the Retention Protection Pledge - a pledge to show support for either:

• Waiving retentions on contracts of £100,000 or less; or
• Committing to placing any retentions withheld in a trust bank account, so that if the retainer becomes insolvent, those retentions remain available to their suppliers.

We look after some of the wealthiest and most discerning clients in the world. They have generally enjoyed great success in their professional endeavours and have assets, lifestyles or business operations that require specialist and expertise that we can offer them.

Our clients are becoming younger and younger - not by virtue of the latest in anti-ageing, but instead because (a) we are in the midst of a great wealth transition; and (b) technology entrepreneurship allows for vast fortunes to be made in a very short period of time by prescient and capable entrepreneurs.

These younger clients, as a generalisation, have a strong sense of social justice; environmental awareness and, we find, are philanthropic in different ways to their forebears.

It is important for us to meet our clients where they are - to demonstrate that these things matter to us as well and, wherever possible, to lead by example when it comes to showing much larger organisations the level of care and attention that, in our view, they ought to be giving to their environmental, social and governance agendas.

As a privately-owned business, we seek to build trust, inspire confidence and create genuine value for all of our stakeholders, not just our clients.

For us, success isn’t measured solely by profit, but also by the positive impact we are able to make on people and our planet.  Setting out our purpose and reporting against our ambitions means showing everyone – our clients, our staff and our broader community – what we stand for and why we work as we do.  This is particularly significant in a world where people increasingly choose to engage with companies that demonstrate authenticity and responsibility.

Similarly, our team members deserve to feel part of something meaningful. By sharing our purpose openly, we help them understand how their daily efforts fit into a bigger picture.

In this way, our purpose is our foundation for a more resilient, trusted business—one that clients want to use, and staff want to be a part of.

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