AHMM stays in red after redundancy costs hit architect for more than £3m

Redundancy costs of more than £3m helped keep AHMM in the red last year, its latest annual numbers have revealed.

The architect said it spent £1.1m on redundancy payments while it also racked up a further £2.1m on underlying payroll costs of those made redundant.

The firm said it cut 129 jobs during the year, a fall of 23%, to end up with 422 staff.

Accounts filed at Companies House for the year to March 2024 show that the practice behind a revamp of the IBM building on London’s South Bank also had to fork out £800,000 as one-off cost for an early break clause on 13,500 sq ft of space it no longer needed at its White Collar Factory studio which it gave up last year.

AHMM, whose directors include former RIBA president Simon Allford, said that “business activity continued to be characterised by fluctuations in project programmes” which had forced it to respond “by significantly restructuring its UK operations”.

Turnover for the year was down 5% to £47m while pre-tax losses narrowed from £1.8m in 2023 to £1.4m.

The majority of its workload is from the UK with revenue of £41m while the rest of the world, which includes a newly opened office in Sydney, Australia, saw income fall 14% to £5m.