Meet the Supplier: AtkinsRéalis

In our latest ‘Meet the Supplier’ feature, we caught up with Thomas Aram, Regional Director of AtkinsRéalis, supplier on the Greener Futures Partnership Decarbonisation Delivery framework.

He talks about the evolution of the global company, being an early adopter of social value, and recent innovations, including the development of a digital roadmap tool, as well as outlining its plans for the future.

 

What is your company’s mission statement/aims/objectives?

To engineer a better future for our planet and its people.

We design and deliver major projects on the built and natural environments all around the world. We believe that digitally enabled engineering has the power to radically improve the way we are all housed, connected, powered, and protected and can change our relationship with our communities and our planet for the better.

Our business is multifaceted, it is the buildings and places business delivering for the Greener Futures Partnership framework, where our domestic retrofit specialists sit.

Can you give us a brief history of your company?

As a world-leading engineering professional services and project management company, our heritage of delivering excellence stretches back over a century.

Our roots trace back to two formerly separate companies: SNC-Lavalin, and Atkins

Our history timeline:

1910s – Our company was formed by Arthur Surveyer in 1911, following a distinguished career in the Canadian Department of Public Works.

1930s – In the UK, Sir William Atkins was setting new standard of excellence and revolutionising engineering by founding W. S. Atkins & Partners.

1990s – WS Atkins expanded its growth, bringing in Faithful & Gould to expand its capabilities.

2000s – In 2002, WS Atkins began trading under the name, Atkins

2010s – In 2010, Atkins extended its footprint in North America by acquiring PBS&J, a Florida-based provider of engineering, planning, architecture, construction, environmental, and program management services.

2023 – In 2023 AtkinsRéalis launched.

What are the benefits of being a supplier on this framework?

Benefits include complete ease of access and speed for the first stage of procurement, as this has already been expended, so it offers value to individual appointments.

Building lasting relationships with the largest housing providers in the UK with the support of a nationally recognised framework provider.

Regularity and consistency of approach through monthly updates

Added value – we are committed to providing additional support through training and knowledge share as part of our business goals and social value commitments. We have been pleased to support the regular AMIP event, and we discuss monthly where we can add value.

Wider services – it gives us an opportunity to discuss the reach back services the wider business can provide in this sector.

What specific products or services does your company deliver through the framework?

We are delivering through the Greener Futures Partnership Decarbonisation Delivery framework, which is focused on PAS2035 compliant Domestic Retrofit. We provide pre-project strategy, advice and planning, end-to-end retrofit project delivery, wrap around project, programme, cost, quality, design and Health and Safety services.

Can you share some key achievements or successful projects completed through the framework?

AtkinsRéalis was appointed by Home Group to support with its ambitious SHDF Wave 2.1 schemes to carry out energy efficient upgrades to over 1000 properties. We undertook retrofit assessments, coordination and design works whilst contractors were mobilising to complete installation works.

What sets your business apart from its competitors?

AtkinsRéalis has the largest building surveying resource pool in the UK with national coverage across 42 offices. This enables us to flex to the demands of retrofit programmes and manage the peaks and troughs throughout the programme duration.

Though iAND, our supply chain management tool we have over 2500 supply chain partners vetted, quality audited and ready to go. We work with local SMEs and sole suppliers as a seamless extension of service to suit programme needs often utilising specialist survey functions such as thermography, air pressure tested and thermal bridge calculations.

Born out of our wider NZC and sustainability advisory teams we have develop bespoke left of zero services, whereby before a project has been realised, we assist with the strategy and analysis of existing portfolios to determine the right approach, best value and pathway to achieve decarbonisation goals.

Supporting this, we have developed our own internal digital solutions to baseline and roadmap client portfolios, Decarbonomics and Integrate Navigator, our programme management tools for live data management and client reporting.

We are a multidisciplinary worldwide engineering and project management organisation, and we use this capability to build the right solution pulling on this vast knowledge to develop a bespoke and local solution. We react to market conditions and challenges and have developed our domestic residential services offering to address the quality issues being reported by central government.

As early adopters of Social Value we have made great progress supporting clients to deliver social value commitments and monitoring our own impact. We have dedicated teams of social value experts that support all our public sector commissions.

The AtkinsRéalis empowering communicates service line works with social housing providers to establish the project social value governance, impact reporting, community benefits and engagement.

AtkinsRéalis is experienced in the operation of large and complex public sector professional services frameworks. We understand the investment required for success, how to manage multiple workstreams and how to deliver on framework and individual call off commitments.

How does your company contribute positively to the communities it operates in?

We lead an empowering communities’ service line, working with housing associations and councils across complex programmes that include Building Safety, Retrofit and homes affected by RAAC. Our service line focuses on three important aspects:

• Governance: Ensuring there is effective oversight and review of social value deliverables, resident needs, no access cases, complaints and the engagement strategy.
• Impact reporting: We set out to understand the impact of projects on residents, through engaging with residents and analysing data on resident make-up, ensuring effective mitigations are put in place across the protective characteristics and household action plans carried out.
• Community benefits: We localise social value deliverables, to ensure impacted residents see the benefits provided by such funds and deliverables align with community aspirations.
• Engagement: We set out engagement strategies across programmes, and help create resident panels, and communication working groups with residents to ensure they directly lead how we engage, support and deliver our projects.

What will be the key areas of focus for your business over the next 12 months?

AtkinsRéalis have invested in aligning to the Government’s targets for domestic retrofit, establishing our response, training and developing our people and creating the tools for effective and efficient delivery.

New build development remains a challenging to achieve the Governments ambitious targets but through schemes such as the Small Site Aggregator, supported by our EDAROTH solution we are working to unlock some of these challenges.

Commercial decarbonisation remains core to our NZC and sustainability teams and we will continue to support public and private sector clients’ strategies and delivery decarbonisation of their existing estates.

During previous periods of economic uncertainty AtkinsRéalis asset management advisory services have thrived as we support clients to deliver efficiency and maximise their existing assets.

During the last five years fire safety services have been growing significantly across all sectors, we will continue to invest in this upward trend delivering, assessment, strategy and engineering fire safety services.

While the industry has mainly focused on reducing operational carbon, there is a growing need to assess fleet decarbonisation alongside existing built assets. Integrating these efforts with energy services supports broader, long-term strategies.

What are the biggest challenges currently facing the housing sector?

Quality, particularly in retrofit. Despite the introduction of PAS2035 we are still experiencing significant compliance and quality issues.

Funding – The government schemes are a great catalyst to retrofit but provide a small portion of the overall funding requirement. Private investment is emerging and needs to address the scale of the requirement.

Cultural change – we are still battling the need to deliver carbon and energy reduction at consumer level, not helped by political uncertainty, causing delivery issues with resident access and cooperation.

What are the biggest challenges currently facing your company and your supply chain partners?

The industry faces a shortage of skilled workers in key areas, highlighted further as we embrace the new requirements for competency assessments. Possibly related to outdated perceptions about what we actually do and the roles that are available. We are doing everything we can to impact change, working with schools, colleges and universities to try and increase the number of people entering the industry. We value and speak positively about core construction trades, traditional roles and share our excitement around emerging roles.

Are there any recent innovations or developments in your business that excite you?

We have recently undertaken a restructure, bringing together three parts of the business under one structure, enabling us to share knowledge and resource across locations, services and sectors in a coordinated approach. A recent example was being able to bring a colleague in to a discussion around anaerobic digestion, a subject I have no knowledge or experience of, but following a couple of messages I found someone in the business that could advise a client.

Having delivered commissions in Decarbonomics, our digital roadmap tool, being able to visual a client’s carbon baseline, analyse decarbonisation opportunities and bring solutions to life in programmes of work is a real benefit from alternative static methods.

If you were Housing Minister for the day, what would you change?

Personally, I think we need to create an environment that incentivises private landlords to improve housing quality. We need private landlords but making money from the lowest income groups with no mechanism to improve quality is a model that I find challenging morally. I’m pro profit but, we need all parties to benefit and want to see more carrot and less stick. I believe this will help unlock housing development, improve the quality of construction and drive up the standards of housing stock.

Critically I would engineer a market that promotes the best performing homes as the highest value homes, changing the way tenants and homeowners think and prioritise the aspects of homes. Market value, location of schools, good public transport, sport and social connections, size and appearance all still all outweigh the energy performance for most consumers principally because its not the normality and too expensive.

Another area I feel passionate about is construction team liability and responsibility, give more power to judges to prosecute poor performance. We want to support good pay for good quality; this isn’t what we are seeing at the moment. All construction roles should understand the legislation the operate under and the impact of non compliance/poor quality. As an RICS member we are driven to demonstrate continuous professional develop but I’m not sure this applies across all roles. Everybody should be given the support and opportunity relevant to their role. Contractors take a lot of the criticism for quality issues, but it’s a much more complex issue than just having the right contractor. We need to foster an environment that puts the pride back in construction!

Can you tell us an interesting fact about your organisation?

AtkinsRéalis was involved in the design of the “Anaconda” an innovative non-mechanical wave energy convertor.