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Lakehouse back in profit after difficult year
Contractor Lakehouse has returned to profit after posting a number of losses over the past year and a half.
The company posted an overall profit for 2017 of £10,000, a significant improvement from the previous year, in which it lost £29.3m, it said in its annual results.
The results also reported that Hackney Council had paid out to the contractor over “the successful outcome of a series of adjudications associated with the resolution of historic matters on a specific contract with Hackney Council”.
Lakehouse had been pursuing Hackney Council over funds it said it was due contractually. The council had claimed that some of Lakehouse’s work, which included fire safety work, was defective.
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In July last year, Philip Glanville, mayor of Hackney, wrote to 166 council chief executives warning them to check work carried out by Lakehouse, whose compliance business, Allied Protection, tested and maintained Grenfell Tower’s fire alarms.
Michael McMahon, chief operating officer at Lakehouse, said their dispute with Hackney was almost completed.
There had been problems with its property services division and Lakehouse has moved instead to a more streamlined business, focusing on building up compliance and energy services.
This led to a reduction in revenue from continuing operations from 3%, from £299.1m in 2016 to £290.3m. Outside of property services, though, underlying revenue in compliance, energy services and construction grew by 21%.
Lakehouse’s order book also increased, growing from £532m to £631m. In its results, however, it noted that the collapse of fellow contractor Carillion would bring further uncertainty to the construction sector.
Mr McMahon told Inside Housing: “Our property service division has seen a reduction in revenue of about 50%. That’s all deliberate, that’s planned. We used part of the last 12 months to downsize the operational overhead, the office infrastructure and the personnel.
“We streamlined quite significantly that business taking out the running costs, to bring it back to a level that focused on working with clients.”
Bob Holt, chair of Lakehouse, said: “As part of the ongoing operational improvement programme, the group continues to streamline the business to focus on building up its core activities of compliance and energy services, where we have strong business and leading market positions.”
Update: at 12.09 on 23.01.18 This story was updated to include Michael McMahon’s comments.
