Leading with confidence: Patricia Moore’s story

It is rare to meet a construction boss who states the aim of the business has been to double in size over five-year cycles and actually achieves it. Interviewing Patricia Moore, T&T’s UK managing director, you understand that ambitious-sounding statements, which might seem like wishful thinking in others, in her case are justified.

T&T is at the top of its game – in the UK and internationally – and she knows it. She’s not boasting, she’s just confident. And you can see why. It paid dividends of more than £70m in the final eight months of last year on £1.1bn of revenue and £141m of pre-tax profit. Income for the UK business was £591m on £86m pre-tax profit for the year to April 2025, that’s in contrast to the £200m turnover when we last interviewed her in 2019.

Of course, growth like that does not happen without a significant intervention; in T&T’s case the £960m CBRE partnership deal in 2021 has been game-changing for the consultant’s global reach, having started life in Darlington nearly 80 years ago and still keeping a strong focus on the UK market. It has been pretty life-changing for many of the equity partners too, one imagines.

>> This week’s interview | ‘We’ve really scaled this business to being number one in our market’: T&T’s Patricia Moore on competing at the top

That’s why it is fascinating to hear from her in today’s interview about the factors that led to the deal and how T&T’s leadership has retained its autonomy while leveraging the benefits of its boosted capabilities.

The scale that T&T operates at is not in everyone’s grasp, or indeed something all businesses aspire to. But managing to stay profitable and to grow through a period of economic and political instability is an achievement many would like to emulate. Building’s own Top 150 Consultants survey last month revealed that only 34% said margins had increased. So what is T&T’s secret sauce?

It feels like the chronic skills problems has shifted recently as young people have switched away from university and towards apprenticeships

Moore acknowledges the consultancy market in the UK is “stressed” at the moment, and says that success requires proactive management and strong bid capability. Clearly T&T’s long-term strategy to diversify across sectors and regions well before the CBRE deal has stood it in good stead. Now, Moore says, it can dial up its capacity when and where it is needed, and dial it down where growth is slow.

Rail, some local government work and the London commercial office sector have all eased off, but there are plenty of other sectors that are flying: aviation, to be sure, but also defence, data centres, and a host of energy and natural resources contracts for mega projects such as Sizewell C and clients such as Anglian Water.

Being in a strong position creates its own momentum. Moore’s own assessment of where T&T sits in the UK consultancy market – in terms of ability to win work and deliver – is that it takes pole position for real estate and infrastructure work, and that it is battling to get to the top spot in energy and natural resources.

Still, having an impressive track record of sound investment and partnership decisions does not give Moore an automatic insight into future threats. She, like so many in the industry, is concerned about next month’s Budget, given the hit businesses took after the chancellor’s previous tax-raising measures. And when asked about her view of the UK market for the next 12 to 18 months, she says that the new normal is that industry leaders can only hope for a meaningful horizon-scanning three months into the future. It is a familiar problem for businesses of all sizes: it looks like market sentiment is returning, and then something else unexpectedly hits, and everyone hunkers down again.

But one aspect of T&T’s growth strategy that is particularly compelling is its commitment to hiring large numbers of apprentices and graduate trainees as part of an annual early careers cohort, which this year numbered 300. It has taken on 70 degree apprentices mainly in cost management simply because it cannot get enough cost managers out of university courses any more.

As many employers are reporting, Moore has seen an increase in the numbers of people applying for degree apprenticeships, but also she says young people are having to be very determined and organised to get accepted onto such schemes. One successful applicant she spoke to the other week had written to over a hundred businesses because he was absolutely focused on going that route.

Having more applicants than places for trainees is a theme that also came up at our Building the Future Conference, where people and skills were the focus of one panel discussion. At the contractor end of the market Alison Riley at McLaughlin & Harvey said it had over 2,500 applications for 12 traineeships. Lots of ideas were mentioned by the panel to help new starters build skills and understand the businesses they are in, but it does feel like the chronic skills problems the industry has complained about for years has shifted recently as young people have switched away from university and towards apprenticeships. Whereas before the industry struggled to attract young people, now it’s struggling to take them on.

One idea T&T has suggested to the government is to set up a UCAS-style central platform to connect employers and applicants. Sounds very sensible, but, unsurprisingly perhaps, it has yet to be taken up.

For her part, a degree apprenticeship was Moore’s route into the industry and she is convinced it is the best one. Others, it seems, are now catching up to her way of thinking.

Chloë McCulloch is the editor of Building