Clancy Consulting aims to exit building services via pre-pack administration

Clancy Consulting has filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators, amid challenges from the building services market. The Manchester engineering consultancy hopes to ringfence its profitable engineering business, while restructuring its other division.

Founded in 1972, Clancy Consulting provides a multi-discipline engineering design, building surveying and advisory service across the built environment. Across eight UK offices, the Manchester-headquartered firm’s specialist engineering fields include pre-planning, building appraisal, civil, structural, building services, and geo-environmental.

Latest filed accounts for Clancy Consulting for the year to the end of March 2024 show it employed 180 staff – however, more recent staff numbers in unfiled accounts were reported by the Construction Enquirer as 118. This may reflect a difficult period for the firm, which has now commenced processes to ‘phoenix’ itself, via a pre-pack administration.

The move will see the firm’s core civil and structural engineering operation transferred to newly formed limited business CCE; which is established at the same address as Clancy Consulting, with a common director. While this preserves the firm’s engineering business, however, it sees the firm exit from the building services market – where it reportedly suffered from a downturn in the sector, and “skills shortages”.

The company has spun this restructuring effort as enabling it to “safeguard over 70 jobs” within the civil and structural engineering business. However, it has also resulting in “unavoidable redundancies” – and the company is now working to transfer members of the building services team to another consultancy where possible.

Chief executive Chris Acton, who took the role in 2024, said, “The previous company carried a historic liability which needed to be addressed. Following a comprehensive review, the administration process was identified as the only mechanism to enable the Civil and Structural Engineering business to separate and move forward as a focused standalone business… The restructure provides a platform to protect those strengths and build a sustainable business focused on the Civil and Structural Engineering expertise for which Clancy has been known for more than 54 years.”

Looking ahead, Acton added that the new business would provide “greater clarity, greater focus and an even stronger platform for our future”. The streamlined business will focus exclusively on civil and structural engineering, the discipline on which Clancy built its reputation over more than five decades, with clients receiving the same service while the firm invested in its core engineering capability.