Mace and Turner & Townsend draw up post-Terminal 5 strategies

Mace has developed a post-T5 strategy to employ the 200 workers it has assigned to the project once the job starts wrapping up in 2008. The firm will expand its rail operation, Mace Rail, which it believes will be able to use the skills of its army of Heathrow Terminal 5 project managers.

Mace Rail is currently about 40-strong and sits in the firm’s infrastructure division.

Mace said its rail business was already starting to pick up. It has just won a deal to project manage two depots in Kent with a combined value of £90m. The depots at Ashford and Ramsgate are for client HSBC Rail, which has a 30-year lease arrangement.

The firm is also anticipating a rail boom in Russia and Eastern Europe, where it hopes to pick up swathes of business in the coming years.

As a key plank in the post-T5 strategy, Mace hired Dean Benson as operations director, infrastructure, in July from Turner & Townsend, where he led the rail business.

Benson said that of roughly 200 Mace staff working at Heathrow, 50 had direct experience of the rail sector, having worked with clients such as London Underground and Network Rail. “The others are transferable. It gives Mace a solid base in the regulated transport sector.”

It is not certain that all 200 T5 staff will transfer to Mace Rail, however, as the strategy depends on how much rail business Mace wins and some may be needed for further work for the British Airports Authority (BAA).

Other UK rail PM contracts under Mace’s belt include the construction of a new station at Deptford, currently underway for Network Rail and a framework deal won from Transport for London, likely to see the firm work on the tube, buses, trams and roads.

We have been working with BAA on a managed ramp down to bring staff off gradually

Bruce McAra, Director of cost management, Turner & Townsend

Turner & Townsend has between 70 and 80 staff assigned to T5, ranging from director to graduate level and comprising cost and project managers and experts in project controls and planning. They will be gradually transferred to the firm’s other aviation jobs, such as terminals one and three at Gatwick and the redevelopment of Stansted, on which T&T is the cost manager. They may also work on Thames Gateway schemes.

Bruce McAra, the firm’s director of cost management, said: “We have been working with BAA on a managed ramp down to bring staff off gradually. We don’t want to lose the knowledge they have gained of the sector, methods of working and partnering ethos.”

EC Harris, which is also working on the Heathrow project, confirmed it did have a post-T5 strategy in place, but would not reveal it before talking to the staff concerned.

At Mace, Rob Ewen, director of infrastructure sector and the Midlands said his firm first got into the rail business over four years ago, but now the plan was to “rebuild our position in the rail sector”.

He said Mace had an edge because its project managers tended to have backgrounds in construction rather than QSing or engineering. He added that rail work was becoming higher profile: “People used to see it as mundane, but it’s the key to most regeneration schemes.”

Mace is expecting some of its T5 staff to come off the project from Christmas 2005. T5 is being constructed in two phases: Phase one will open in 2008 with the completion of the main terminal (T5A) and first satellite building (T5B), phase two will open in 2011 with the construction of the second satellite building (T5C).