‘Sometimes you pinch yourself.’ The boy from the Chester semi running €4bn Arcadis

“I lived with my granddad. It was his house we were in. My granddad, my mum and dad and me. A semi down by the river in Chester.

“I’m not saying we were poor, but I remember going to college and my dad saying, ‘Well, we can’t afford anything to pay for it’. So I was fully grant aided. Then you come to this and you think, ‘Oh my god’. You’re running 36,000 people and four billion and sometimes you have to pinch yourself.”

Alan Brookes was made chief executive of Arcadis last month, with the 61-year-old taking over from Dutchman Peter Oosterveer to become the first boss of a firm whose heritage stretches back to 1888 who calls the UK his home.

When it was confirmed that he would be in charge of a business whose €4bn (£3.4bn) income exceeds that of most contractors – never mind consultants – in this country, an old client got in touch.

“He said: ‘Do you remember the heady days in Liverpool, when you were pitching to do a few restaurants for McDonald’s?’ Someone said to me the other week: ‘How much is the turnover of Arcadis and I said about four billion and he said: ‘Well, that was an easy throwaway line’ and I replied: ‘I try not to think about it’.”

A trained building surveyor, Brookes joined Arcadis when EC Harris, the company he was working for at the time, was bought by the firm in 2011.

EC Harris, in turn, had bought the company that Brookes was in charge of – surveyor Povall Flood Wilson – at the turn of the century, which before was known as Povall Worthington, later merging with a QS called Flood & Wilson.

He started work for Povall Worthington in 1984, which included one of his more memorable jobs replacing the copper dome roof on the Port of Liverpool building, one of the city’s Three Graces on the waterfront. The newly clad roof looked brown, impressing Brookes so much that he began taking pictures.

The middle ground is always the most difficult – you can’t quite follow the bigger clients but you’re too big for the smaller stuff

“A lovely old lady came up to me and said, ‘It’s not the same now it’s not green, son’. Give it a few more months, I thought.”

If Brookes’ CV proves one thing, it is that there has always been consolidation in the sector – and he thinks there is more to come.

“There are still too many players,” he says. “You’ll need a number of players who can handle the big projects and the smaller players who can look after the local clients and want to be in those areas.

“The middle ground is always the most difficult – you can’t quite follow the bigger clients but you’re too big for the smaller stuff.”

Earlier this year, Turner & Townsend’s deal for Alinea caught a lot off-guard and shocked many more.

“I wasn’t surprised,” says Brookes of the deal. “When I was at Povall Flood Wilson, our biggest client was [electronics retailer] Dixons.

“Dixons said it was branching into Europe, it was going all over Europe. But that’s really expensive to actually start following a client when you’ve no footprint, to set up locations, to set up entities that probably all need funding and all of this becomes very expensive. It’s a lot of cash.

“There comes a point where you need cash and you need investments. I think everybody’s ambitious, they want to grow. But there comes a point where that growth tips over, where you need to actually then consolidate or join together to follow your clients successfully.”

He was working in Asia when EC Harris was snapped up 12 years ago – partly because of its foothold in that region – and he was brought back to the UK three years later to help integrate Arcadis’s acquisition of Hyder in 2014 as well as complete some legacy issues from its deal in 2005 to buy AYH.

I would never want to be the biggest, but there is an inevitability about more consolidation [in the sector]. There needs to be a size and scale

The consolidation keeps on happening. Last year Arcadis took over Canadian architect IBI – which also works in the UK, where it is perhaps best known for healthcare jobs – and Irish process engineer DPS, which Brookes says “gets us into growth areas such as EV [electric vehicle] and battery production”.

He adds: “I would never want to be the biggest, but there is an inevitability about more consolidation [in the sector]. There needs to be a size and scale.”

It is that size and scale which has helped the firm open up channels of communication with government. Brookes is speaking the day after meeting investment minister Dominic Johnson, which gave him the chance to tell those in power what they could be doing better.

“[Johnson was] asking what we can to do to help, and I told him a commitment to pipeline and expenditure. If government can do that, we can commit to growing investment in people and skills.”

He says: “We have a really good order book right now, but everybody is just watching. We’ve shifted to industrial and manufacturing and hi-tech while we look at commercial development as being quite soft.”

In his chat with Johnson, Brookes also raised the issue of housing. A recent report from Arcadis said that high-rise residential buildings currently in procurement in London could be delayed for as long as nine months after the introduction of the mandatory second staircase rule by the Greater London Authority.

“Housing is fairly flat right now, there are too many restrictions. How can we unlock these?” The second staircase ruling, while known, is giving firms jitters, he says. “Suddenly you have a contracting market and a loss of confidence because the returns aren’t there.”

I would not start something like [HS2], go as far as you’ve gone and say, ‘We’ll leave it at Old Oak Common’. You’ve got to have real access into London

He is also worried by government flip-flopping on HS2. “It doesn’t help,” he says, adding that he “doesn’t understand” the decision to pause work building the new railway’s main London terminus at Euston, meaning passengers will have to get off at Old Oak Common and make their way into central London by different means.

Arcadis is working on other parts of the line, including project managing the new station at Birmingham’s Curzon Street, but Brookes says: “I would not start something like that, go as far as you’ve gone and say, ‘We’ll leave it at Old Oak Common’. You’ve got to have real access into London.

“With these big projects, once you’ve made a decision, you have to stick with it. We do seem to have this stop-start attitude in this country.”

Brookes, who is based between London and his Cheshire home when not running Arcadis from its headquarters in Amsterdam, says: “Coming down to London, why would I get off at Old Oak? What is it actually going to save me? I’ll still go into Euston on the existing line thank you very much.”

Do they do things differently overseas? “You get the same procrastination but very often, once the decision is made, it’s delivered.”

He says the Dutch, for example, think things through carefully – and then do it. “In the Netherlands, you’re no further than 4km from a charging point for an electric car. With electric cars in this country, the biggest challenge is charging points.

It’s no good the government saying, ‘We’re all going to have electric cars’, if you don’t have the infrastructure that supports that

“It’s no good the government saying, ‘We’re all going to have electric cars’, if you don’t have the infrastructure that supports that. I had an electric car.”

Had? “I got range anxiety and now have a hybrid. A journey to Penzance was the final straw.” Charging points were either broken or spaces were taken by petrol cars, he adds.

Arcadis’s biggest market is the US, where it has around 70 offices and 7,000 staff. The UK is second and, since taking on the top role, Brookes has been on a whistlestop tour, visiting the firm’s outposts in the UK and across the globe.

So far it has included visits to the US, India, Canada and the Philippines. It has also seen him lose his luggage in Australia. “I just went to the nearest department store and got a brand-new wardrobe.”

Since swapping the chief operating officer’s role for chief executive, more of his time is taken up with meeting shareholders and investors with his chief financial officer.

His message for the money men is that the sector will change in the coming decade. “In 10 years’ time, I think things will be very different. Clients will be looking for more advice and advisory roles. We will look for advisory skills, asset lifecycle skills, digital, analytical advisory capabilities – those are the things we are thinking of in the future.”

He says the firm is looking at organic growth, too, and is eyeing the growing AI market with excitement. “We’re looking at it in a really positive way. We get a range of reactions [from staff] but we have a lot of highly curious people.”

He says the technology will allow the more mundane tasks to be done by AI, freeing up staff to provide the critical advice which he says will become more and more of a key demand from clients.

People realise that digital is changing the way we work and that AI is coming. If you want to have a successful career, you to have to stay on that learning curve

Does it not mean, though, that people will lose their jobs eventually? “I’m hoping not. We can use people’s skills and develop the skills for the future.

“People realise that digital is changing the way we work and that AI is coming. If you want to have a successful career, you to have to stay on that learning curve.”

That includes making the business as diverse as possible. “In Asia, we managed to get a really diverse leadership team and I think the success we had there was because of that diversity.”

He says barriers across the industry have to come down and admits: “If people don’t say they have unconscious bias, they’re probably lying. We’ve all got to be aware of where our biases lie and how we come across – and of making assumptions.”

Brookes is the chair of CRASH, the construction industry’s charity for homeless people, and says this has helped to shape his views. “It’s a real passion of mine – to make Arcadis open, transparent and diverse.”

He says he was recently shocked when the winners of a competition that Arcadis ran at a school in Milton Keynes could not make it to London to collect their iPad prizes.

Why can’t we do apprenticeships from under-represented groups? It will take time [but] we’ve got to do something about it

Arcadis had to send the train tickets to the children and was told that iPads were a nice present but inappropriate because their parents could not afford Wi-fi. The firm was also asked by the girls’ school if they could provide the pair with a hot meal as the school usually did this and it was their one hot meal of the day.

“This really opened my eyes and I thought, why can’t we do apprenticeships from under-represented groups? It will take time [but] we’ve got to do something about it.

“It will take time, and you could ask what difference will it make? But everybody could say that.

“Why don’t we start somewhere and try and make a difference? I haven’t thought it all through, but I want to do something.”

As for Arcadis, he is no less ambitious. “I want us to be technology-enabled, really build our reputation for sustainability and make Arcadis a welcoming business for all people. Maybe that sounds a bit grandiose, but I’d like to think we can.”