‘I’ll retire when we double in size’… Stantec’s new regional boss on his ambitions for the UK energy sector

Brian Yates is moving to London later this year, but it will not be his first time living in the capital. When Stantec’s new managing director for the UK and Ireland was 20, he spent a summer working in the city as a fishmonger at Selfridges.

The Canada native loved almost everything about London –  “had I not had a girlfriend waiting for me back in Nova Scotia, I would have stayed” – except for the jellied eels.“They wanted me to taste everything that we were selling,” he explains.

“The taste didn’t really stick with me. But what I really didn’t like was the consistency where, because it’s an eel, you’ve got these ribs in each segment.” He shudders at the memory.

Yates is now returning to the city in rather more lofty circumstances. He has been tasked with overseeing a huge expansion of Stantec’s presence in the region, both through acquisitions and organic growth of its own workforce. Labour’s moonshot pledge to decarbonise the UK’s energy grid by 2030 has opened a window for the engineering firm, dangling the opportunity of a vast amount of work for engineers and infrastructure specialists in the energy sector. 

It will not just involve massively expanding capacity in renewable energy – including offshore wind, which the government somewhat ambitiously wants to quadruple within the next six years – but also a complete overhaul of the country’s electricity infrastructure. The National Grid has said it will need to build five times more electricity transmission upgrades over the next six years than it has done over the past three decades just to accommodate the government’s offshore wind ambitions.

We’ve talked about being able to double our business in the UK, whether it’s two, five or 10 years. I think that’s entirely reasonable

It is this work which Yates sees as one of many exciting growth sectors for Stantec’s business in the region, which currently has a turnover of around £245m. “We can easily be half again or even double that,” he claims.

“We’ve talked about being able to double our business in the UK, whether it’s two, five or 10 years. I think that’s entirely reasonable. I think I could easily see us, before I retire, being twice the size we are now.”

When does he plan to retire? “When we double in size”.

The firm, which was founded in 1954 in Edmonton, Canada, reported a global turnover of £3.93bn in its latest accounts and operates 450 offices globally. Its headcount stands at around 31,000 employees, with close to 4,000 working in the UK.

Around 1,000 of these were added in May this year when it acquired Bristol-based Hydrock, a £74m-turnover regional rival. Previous acquisitions in the UK include Barton Willmore, Esi Consulting, Peter Brett Associates and MWH.

Yates says Stantec is “pretty bullish” about the opportunity to expand further in the UK because of the policy consistency from Labour, which unveiled its 10-year industrial strategy this month. “They provide a lot of clarity about where they want to go, and we’re looking forward to a continuation of that,” he says.

He has spent most of the past three decades in Vancouver, on the west coast of Canada, where he was until recently responsible for the engineering firm’s business in British Columbia. But it is in the UK where he sees greater potential for growth. 

“That’s why I came here,” he says. “British Columbia is a great place to live, right? Vancouver is fantastic, but I was looking at what is coming in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and you know, from a public policy perspective, where you want to go for opportunities.

“I am very excited to be here, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us going forward.”

Building is speaking to Yates in Stantec’s office in Farringdon, but he is currently based in Manchester. He moved there earlier this year and is spending a few months being brought up to speed on the UK market by his predecessor Cath Schefer. He says he is enjoying his time there, although his first impression of the city came as a surprise.

Yates had based his expectations on the opening titles of Coronation Street. This may seem unlikely, but he is a seasoned viewer of the soap opera, which he used to watch with his parents when growing up in Canada in the 1970s along with other UK imports including the Queen’s annual Christmas messages.

“When I arrived in Manchester, I had those biases around what I would see on TV,” he admits. “And I was surprised at how modern and how vibrant Manchester is right now compared to the opening theme of Coronation Street.”

I envied all the cities that would get rock stars coming to perform. David Bowie would never go to Halifax

He compares the city’s transformation over the past few decades to his hometown, New Glasgow, an industrial city on the northern coast of Nova Scotia. Returning there a few years ago, he noted how much it had changed.

“I was thinking, I wish it had been like that when I was growing up. Even the river was unswimmable when I was a kid. And now people are regularly jumping in it.”

It was in Nova Scotia that he started his career as a biologist and environmental scientist, working for a local firm, Jacques Whitford. But he was restless – “I envied all the cities that would get rock stars coming to perform. David Bowie would never go to Halifax” – and so he ended up moving to Indonesia to help develop environmental projects in the country, working on a Canadian government-funded project for Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University.

After three years he moved back to Canada, to Vancouver, with his girlfriend at the time, now his wife, partly because it was a big international city. Apart from an 18-month stint in Singapore, he spent most of the next two decades working for companies on the Canadian west coast including AtkinsRealis predecessor SNC Lavalin, where he led the community engagement business in British Columbia and Yukon. 

In 2018 he was appointed vice-president of British Columbia at Stantec, which has nine offices in the region and more than 1,000 staff. The province produces almost all (98%) of its energy from renewable sources, and Yates’ experience with the market has shaped his view of the potential for the firm in the UK.

One of his first projects, at the beginning of his career, was a thermal coal mine, but he has always been passionate about more sustainable forms of energy.

“In the early 90s, I used to wonder when I’d be able to work on a wind farm. These things were pie in the sky. They weren’t real… and now, it’s here” he says.

“I’m living in a context where governments and the public and even our investors are all wanting us to pursue net zero goals, projects that deliver value to local communities and environmental benefits.”

Right now we’ve got the opportunity to help and shape the essential infrastructure for generations in the United Kingdom and Ireland

While he sees most of the developed world heading in the same direction on net zero, he believes the UK is further ahead along this course than even North America and more “explicit” about the need to build vast amounts of new infrastructure in order to achieve these goals. “That really excites me,” he says.

“The thing that is attractive – not just for me, but I think should be for anyone in our business – is right now we’ve got the opportunity to help and shape the essential infrastructure for generations in the United Kingdom and Ireland.”

Part of the problem is the decentralisation of energy sources, which currently run mostly from fossil fuel plants in the North of the country to more populated areas in the South. The expansion of renewable sources, both through onshore wind scattered across the country and offshore wind off the east coast in sites like the massive Dogger Bank project, requires the grid to be reconfigured on an “unprecedented” scale, according to the boss of the National Grid. John Pettigrew told The Times this month that the task was the “equivalent of what the Victorians did… in terms of the scale of infrastructure”.

The upheaval that this work could cause to local communities, through digging up streets and building new pylon networks, is likely to see Labour come under attack from both the right and left of the political spectrum over the next few years. Former Conservative energy secretary Claire Coutinho branded the party’s plans as “mad, bad and dangerous” during this year’s general election, while at the Labour conference in September, Gary Smith, the leader of the GMB union, said there had been a “fundamental dishonesty” in the debate about the costs of decarbonisation in the UK.

Smith, who has become the arch nemesis of Labour’s green lobby, claimed the idea that the transition from gas to electricity could be achievable without massive cost to the economy through harm to existing fossil fuel industries was “frankly just not real world”.

But the cost of not pushing forward is already evident. British Steel’s ambitions to switch to producing “green steel” were set back this month when the National Grid told the firm that it would not have access to a new electricity connection before 2032. The steelmaker had hoped to switch to a lower carbon electric arc furnace at its Scunthorpe plant next year. 

It can currently take up to 15 years for wind and solar projects to secure a connection to the grid, according to research by energy consultancy Cornwall Insight, while more than 60% of projects waiting for a connection did not progress at all between 2018 and 2023. Meanwhile, a report by the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee this year found that there was more than double the amount of renewable energy generation in the pipeline than was needed to achieve the previous government’s 2035 net zero power target.

Yates has said he would like to see Stantec become a “trusted advisor” to the government, and this is where his community engagement experience in British Columbia may come in useful. He stresses the opportunities for the UK.

“Global investment wants to find projects that are powered by clean power, and in a context where there’s a lot of sustainability goals. I’ve seen that elsewhere. In the jurisdiction I came from, it was the same,” he says.

“It’s an exciting time to be in our business, and I think the more we communicate that to our clients and potential recruits and so on, it’s good for us. But it’s also just a reason for optimism, because I think, directionally, the UK and Ireland is going the right way.”