Hello, and welcome to the presentation of Gateley Group's interim results for the six months ending thirty-first October 2023. I'm Rod Waldie, the CEO of Gateley Group, and as usual, I'm joined by our CFO, our Chief Financial Officer, Neil Smith, and our Acquisition Director, Nick Smith. So let's go straight to the next slide, the overview slide. Before I get into the detail in this slide, the key points that we want to emphasize in this presentation for you to then look back on are, well, firstly, that our H1 2024 outturn is a further demonstration of our unbroken track record of growth, of which, of course, we are very proud. Also, we have a continuing commitment to invest in line with our stated strategy to differentiate via diversification and thereby enhance the Group's resilience. These results demonstrate that our strategy is working for us in practice.
As in the announcement that we made of the interim results, we'll illustrate this with both statistics and insight to activity mix on each of our platforms. Our outlook, while our outlook remains sensibly cautious in relation to the near term, the rationale for which I'll summarize in the outlook slide at the end of today's presentation. In overview, well, as always, and really importantly, I'm grateful to everyone in the group for their hard work to deliver these results and for their ongoing commitment to delivering the best possible outcomes for our clients. For some of our teams, the more challenging market conditions that we reported at the end of the last financial year prevailed throughout the first half of this year, and in truth, they continue to do so. Here, I'm referring mainly to our transactional teams.
Like us, I'm sure that most people watching this presentation will recognize fairly stagnant transactional activity ongoing in most sectors in the market. Despite this, the transactional activity that we handled in the first half of the financial year, combined with the ongoing good activity in those parts of the Group that are countercyclical or economically agnostic in nature, resulted in revenue growth of 7.6% at the half year point and underlying profit before tax growth of 4.6%. In addition, our balance sheet continues to strengthen with 11.7% growth in net assets, which now stand in value at GBP 83.3 million. So our outturn is, in a material part, the product of the resilience that we continue to build into both our legal and consultancy services.
I've already mentioned that the macroeconomic, economic backdrop presented, and it does continue to present challenges for our transactional legal services teams. However, our contentious services continue to grow and accounted for 36.7% of the Group's revenue in the first half of the financial year. Overall, we delivered 2.4% growth in legal services revenue, all of which was organic. Alongside this, our consultancy revenue grew by 24.1% to GBP 22.6 million, of which 12.1% is organic growth. Taken as a whole, consultancy revenue grew to 27.6% of the Group's total half-year revenue. This, I think, is a clear illustration of our strategy progression. Segmental reporting is by reference to our platforms, and you can see in this slide in-period revenue growth on two of our four platforms.
The relatively slight decline in revenue on our corporate platform can be attributed to the dominance of transactional legal services on that platform. Our people revenue, people platform revenue is essentially flat, and I'll give some platform by platform insight in a later slide. In the meantime, the splits in this slide show the ongoing progress that we're making in developing and growing consultancy services on our business services, people, and property platforms. The resultant resilience is best illustrated on our property platform, which, where we've seen like-for-like drop-off in real estate transactional activity, which reflects market conditions. But nevertheless, overall revenue grew on that platform by 12.4%, significantly aided by further growth in consultancy services on that platform. Okay, so moving on to the next slide, please.
As I said at the top of the presentation, while continuing macro uncertainty very much informs our near-term outlook, and of course, we remain cost conscious, we do continue to invest in line with our strategy to differentiate via diversification while enhancing our resilience. Our platforms absolutely remain our vectors for growth, and our investment is increasingly informed by a broader understanding of opportunities in our chosen markets via the acquisitions that we've made to date.... This slide gives some examples of in-period investment, which in addition to ongoing investment in integrating already acquired businesses, includes, well, firstly, the seeding via lateral hiring of two new legal services litigation teams, dealing with class action claims and international arbitrations. In both, in both cases, this is specialist complex work on long-term mandates. Our outlay here necessarily includes related investment in IT systems and marketing.
By its nature, this type of work has a longer term return profile, and while in the meantime there will be some cash and margin impact, the ultimate value of our credentials in this type of litigation is very much in line with our long-term ambitions. Meanwhile, in consultancy services, in July 2023, we completed the acquisition of Richard Julian & Associates Limited. This is a surveying business with particular expertise in project management services to the affordable housing sector. I'm delighted to say that RJA is integrating really well, and it's performing in line with expectation and making immediate contribution and winning significant new work.
In Gateley Smithers Purslow, our surveying business, whose largest service line is the provision of specialist surveying services to U.K. property insurers in relation to major loss claims, we've invested to increase capacity to meet growth in demand as environmental factors and events pile claims on insurers. So that's some indication of the types of investment that we've made in period. Moving on to the next slide, please. Platform insight. Well, the key purpose of this slide is to show some revenue splits between units and service lines on each of our platforms. I think the slide speaks for itself in this regard, but it's also a useful segue for me to pull from our RNS, some current platform insight. So working from left to right on the slide, and dealing firstly with the property platform, this absolutely remains our largest and most mature platform.
As I mentioned earlier, it grew revenue by 12.4% during the first half of the financial year, and that's against the backdrop of challenging transactional market conditions in U.K. residential and commercial real estate. In legal services on this platform, the house building sector remains our biggest segment. Despite market conditions, the team's market leading credentials, allied to the wide range of specialist services provided, delivered 8.2% revenue growth. This contrasts with the circa 24% contraction that we saw in commercial real estate revenue versus a much more active market in that space in the first half of 2023. However, upticks in countercyclical legal services activity on this platform is best illustrated by the 33% revenue growth in contentious construction and 21% growth in revenue in our real estate dispute resolution team.
You can absolutely see the impressive growth in consultancy revenue on this platform, of which over 25% was organic. Earlier, I referred to recent and ongoing investment deliberately in specialist services to more economically agnostic markets, like the property insurance claims market, which is a significant factor in the 39% revenue growth delivered by Gateley Smithers Purslow. Consultancy revenue now represents 40% of overall H1 revenue on the property platform. Moving on to the corporate platform. Well, this platform is absolutely dominated by legal services, and we anticipate that it always will be. Most of those legal services are focused upon transactional work. Therefore, as I've already said, in a stagnant transactional market, I was encouraged by relatively minor revenue contraction of just under 6% on this platform. Flip sides to transactional activity include work in our restructuring team.
It had a busy first half and increased revenue by over 40% on a like-for-like basis. Activity levels in restructuring and general outlook in that space remain strong, and this team is doing well, as is the related service line in our banking team in legal services. Moving on to the business services platform. Well, revenue on this platform grew by just under 25%, 24.7%. In legal services, our commercial dispute resolution and regulatory teams have been, and I'm pleased to say, remain busy. Complex international disputes work is on a much improving trajectory as the team develops credentials in new geographies, having been forced away from established mandates in Russia and neighboring countries....
Here, we are particularly excited by the already mentioned investment that we've made in specialist class action and international arbitration teams, from which we expect returns to feed in from financial year 2025 and, of course, onwards. In consultancy services, our patent and trademark attorney businesses are trading in line, and they also have positive outlook. In period, we extended our expertise in this space with the hiring of experts in IP commercialization and valuation, and we are genuinely encouraged by further opportunities to add to our intellectual property advisory services, both in legal and consultancy terms. On our people platform, we saw a very slight revenue contraction. Revenue on that platform is essentially flat.
In our legal services employment team, the known runoff from one of its largest clients, the BMA, is almost complete, and the team is utilizing its related expertise to begin to build its credentials in helping NHS trusts with internal investigations, which is hoped to be a strong specialist work area for us. Meanwhile, our legal services pensions team and our pensions trustee business, En trust, are performing well in delivering combined revenue growth of about 50% on a like-for-like basis. Revenue contracted in our talent assessment and development and cultural change consultancies, t-three and Kiddy. However, this is anticipated to improve, and in the meantime, those businesses are working closely with our employment legal services teams. For example, on joint opportunities flowing from changes in legislation in relation to diversity and inclusion. There is real opportunity for both legal services and consultancy services in that space.
Moving on to the next slide, please. At this point, I hand over to Neil to pick up some of the financial fundamentals. Over to you.
Thank you, Rod. Good morning, everybody. Move on to the next slide, please. Rod's provided a great overview of how we're seeing the group's current and outlook performance at the moment. We continue to remain cautious as a result of predominantly the current economic environment. Our caution arises due to the fact there appears to be, you know, no immediate stimulus to change market conditions at the moment. This is predominantly, as Rod indicated, seen on transactional services, but maybe this will change through the impending general election, but who knows? We'll just have to wait and see. All we can do is focus on our own performance whenever the environment throws at us, and do as we've always done at Gateley, and invest sensibly for future growth.
Our headline numbers from a financial perspective continue to show healthy progression as inflation calms down and interest rates appear to have peaked in this environment. We continue to test and successfully demonstrate the resilience of the group and the work streams we have invested in. People won't see it yet, but the investment we have added this year in the class action work stream is, and could potentially be, the largest and most lucrative investment we've ever made. The possible returns from this will take a few years to start showing in our numbers, but we're excited about the possible outcomes. Litigation on this scale will certainly change the mix of work types performed by Gateley moving forward. But for now, I wanted to run through a few of the key movements on this first slide. We're pleased with the revenue growth.
I'm not going into further detail on revenue. Rod's, Rod's overview was a perfect scene setter of how each of our platforms have been performing. Our business sells time. The measurement of that time is through what we call activity levels or utilization. And you'll see on the chart that activity levels in H1 at 83% are down on the above average 89% we saw at last half year. But more in line with the 84% we saw two years ago in H1 2022. Our model typically operates at 85%, so you can see that while it's slightly down on H1 this year, it's not a million miles away from the normal performance level.
On my next slide, I'll go through those activity levels in a bit more detail in terms of the position and timing of the year that we're seeing at the moment. Our underlying profit margin has dropped slightly, due mainly to higher people costs in H1, as we've invested in new hires and looked to support growth areas of the group, such as GSP, as Rod's mentioned. Our staff headcount numbers support this increase in cost. However, some of these new people are at the partner leader level and are based in our London office, so obviously, costs would necessarily be higher in that, in those type of recruitments.
I'm talking here about leaders of the class action international arbitrations teams predominantly. Overheads as a percentage of fees have increased by roughly 1%, as H1 last year was still benefiting from the last six months of a previous energy deal. This H1, we are on a higher tariff, and aside from energy, technology and the new work stream investments we have made, and continue to make, have strategically increased our running costs. You'll recall from previous presentations, we installed a new finance system in June 2022. This was inevitably going to increase costs, but is necessary for ongoing integration. Our numbers also reflect a full half year cost of Symbiosis acquisition, and the part year addition of RJA in this current period. I'm expecting more to come on margin.
You'll recall, we've increased our headline rates in each of the last two financial years, what we charge the clients, and although cost increases have proven more difficult to pass on to clients in transactional service areas at the moment, due to those areas becoming more competitive and there being less work, there is much, much bigger scope, sorry, in contentious work streams. In other words, the pivot in service lines will and should assist margins going forward. Lockup has moved out slightly, with a small improvement in debtor days, offset by a greater increase from WIP days, due to this change in mix of work types. Overall, lockup days are in line with what we've made successfully over many years now. However, there's a big opportunity for us to focus on here.
We know we can improve this position despite the more difficult economic environment, and I expect to be able to demonstrate improvements in the future, that will improve cash generation. Finally, on this first slide, we propose to pay a GBP 0.033 dividend on the half year results. A maintained level at this stage in the year reflects our caution on H2. Next slide, please. Back to those activity trends. I want to talk to you about the impact in what we're seeing as a U-shaped pivot from transactional to contentious service areas, and how the economic conditions are causing that to be more of a U rather than V-shaped. The current conditions are resulting client transactions slowing and taking longer to complete. Valuations on deals for clients are less certain, so decision-making is less certain and elongated.
The main impact of this has been on our corporate and property platforms, but has also impacted legal services on our business services platform, in the form of commercial due diligence, and our people platform, where employment services that support the corporate transactions have been more subdued. The transactional areas of these platforms are currently larger than the contentious areas. The flip side of it to this, is that our consultancy services, together with our countercyclical legal services, are showing significant increases in activity. Rod touched on a number of the percentages as he did his platform analysis. And when transactions slow, that change can happen quickly. The flip side of that, is they can switch back on very quickly. So I think we're well placed with our transactional teams, to benefit from, future upticks in activity levels for them. The contentious service lines react very differently.
They take much longer to get started, and last much longer in duration, but are often able to charge higher headline rates. Work in progress are unbilled time. The buildup of that takes longer. The results from that span multiple years, and then when they finish or wind down, they take much longer to cease and wash through our numbers. So with that as a backdrop, I wanted to highlight our monthly utilization trends. The chart on the screen is chargeable hours versus budgeted chargeable hours, as a percentage by month. Q1 was tough, you'll have read this in our RNS, but overall, at a similar level to last year. Q2 was slightly improved and encouraging, but Q3, not on the chart, obviously, it's post the results that we're reporting at this point, thus far has been lower than we expected.
You'll see by the typical change in activity levels from January onwards in previous years, therefore, why we have released a cautionary note this time around. I'm not expecting the January and beyond highs of the yellow FY 2023 line. There's currently not a stimulus in the economy at the moment, and as mentioned earlier, the interest landscape is much different to what it was last year. Yes, interest rates are probably a little more settled now, but that is not going to change my cautious view on activity in the run-up to our year end. Against this activity backdrop, we've done all we can at the moment to move our charge-out rates up. Conversion of those rates into fees has not had a material effect at the moment, but I am expecting this to work through in our higher weighted second half of the financial year and future years.
Everyone is working very hard to achieve the best outcome we can this year, but considering all these factors, I'm sure you can see why I remain cautious on the short term full year outcome. Next slide, please. Our balance sheet remains a big asset to us. It continues to grow as we invest further. We have a number of inbuilt strengths, such as our conservative revenue recognition policy, our well-managed lockup, and our low gearing. While utilizing cash to expand again this year, we move into H2 2024 with significant headroom in our RCF, our funding facility. We are currently GBP 14 million drawn on our GBP 30 million facility, and this facility is used primarily for acquisition financing.
I'm not expecting huge changes in our balance sheet shape as we end of FY 2024, but we'll shortly be recommencing discussions around our funding lines and their renewal in April 2025. Alongside the RCF, we also have a litigation funding facility, which will be used with our new work streams. Next slide, please. Consultancy income growth. We've talked a lot about our strategy of building on our important legal service foundations by acquiring complementary consultancy services. On an already diversified legal business, we are diversifying further for acquisition into wider consultancy services. Whilst our property platform, which is a really good example of this, naturally continues to throw up interesting opportunities, you'll note from its 12.4% growth, what can happen when selecting the right acquisitions to complement the legal foundations already existing in that platform.
Over the last two reporting periods, we've added patent attorney and trademark services to our group, and more recently, added our client services to support affordable housing through RJA. By the end of FY 2025, I expect all of our businesses to be on our new financial system, therefore aiding further cross-selling and financial management. Next slide, please. Since IPO, our profit performance at both our half and full year staging posts retains a good track record of consistent growth that investors can align themselves with. While recruitment markets remain challenging, wage inflation is more subdued, and we continue to look at driving efficiencies through the centralization of processes and investment in IT, that will help continue to maintain our track record of growth.
We feel confident, we have more than enough property space to facilitate growth, and we are cautious in our investments, but at the same time, not afraid to back new revenue streams when the business case supports them, as demonstrated so far in this presentation. I echo Rod's caution over the short term, but remain confident on our medium-term performance, and excited about our long-term opportunities. I'll hand over to Nick now, who's going to talk to you about the M&A landscape.
Thanks, Neil. Our stated objective at IPO in 2015 was to differentiate ourselves from the competition by becoming a broad-based professional services group. We were, of course, at IPO, exclusively a legal services business, and our plan was to acquire and aggregate complementary businesses around our existing core markets and client base. We completed our first acquisition, Capitus, rebranded Gateley Capitus, in April 2016, and since then, we've made a further 13 acquisitions, two of which expanded legal operations. We now operate our group around our four platforms, with consultancy present in all four. In July 2023, we acquired Richard Julian & Associates, the seventh acquisition onto our property platform. RJA continues to scale our quantity surveying and project management services offering by focusing on organizations in the affordable housing sector, a sector which we believe has cross-party commitment and support for the longer term.
RJA adds further economically agnostic revenues and resilience to what is already our largest and most diverse platform. Consultancy revenues now represent 27.4% of overall group revenue, a position we've built steadily and deliberately over the eight years since flotation. We are a professional services group with a long history of success and growth. As such, our strategy has always been to follow our clients as their businesses develop, and on one level, our IPO strategy didn't change that. It merely extended the scope of our ambition. In our M&A strategy, we've added service lines principally around existing client markets and around the business issues already in some way supported by existing operations. Acquisitions are de-risked to that extent, but as consultancy businesses have integrated and continued to grow in our group, so those operations become core services around which we can also invest.
And so the program moves on, increasingly broadening our offering over time, but with each acquisition, a measured step, de-risked by, and itself de-risking existing operations. RJA is a good example of that, but so is Symbiosis, which, while adding life sciences as a new market, was de-risked by our existing patent attorney businesses in Adamson Jones. Similarly, for example, on our property platform, where t-three added cultural change to our existing leadership assessment and development operations. Our M&A is intended to be meaningful but also gradual. And given that our group now supports clients around their business services, corporate, people, and property needs, its opportunity is extremely wide, and our M&A pipeline, so far in our eight-year journey, is always interesting. But because of that breadth, and because of the dynamics of individual professional services markets, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution.
And so at any one time, we're considering and have considered deals of all shapes and sizes, from very tightly defined niche or bolt-on additions to scale-up opportunities. All can be considered by us, provided overall balance is maintained across the group. We remain committed to our objectives that we laid out in 2015, and that's 'cause we believe our diversification has dual appeal and is working. It's progressive, as it differentiates us and assists us in winning new clients and a bigger share of client spend. But it also adds resilience as we continually increase our number of target submarkets, each with their own economic drivers. You can see that perfectly illustrated, we believe, in our H1 numbers, for example, on our property platform.
In certain circles, property business is seen as principally, economically, positively correlated, and yet, while economic growth has been subdued, subdued in recent times, our property business grew in period by 12.4%, directly as a result of our diversified property revenues. We take comfort from results to date, and we remain committed to our longer term plans. Rod?
Thanks, Nick. Okay, so just moving on to a couple of slides around operational highlights before I get to summary and outlook. Let's go straight to the next slide. Responsible business. Well, responsible business, our responsible business strategy really matters to us here at Gateley. Why is that? Well, firstly, because it's very definitely a component of our purpose statement. You can see our purpose statement on this slide, highlighted in yellow. In our purpose statement, we recognize that business is an important catalyst for change. And in our case, our strategy is developed to positively impact the well-being of our employees, but also to help us unlock potential in the communities in which we operate. Our actions very much remain benchmarked to those of the U.K.'s Levelling Up goals, that we feel that we can help contribute towards achieving.
These are goals that really matter and really matter to society in challenging times. Our responsible business strategy makes us a more purposeful and compelling organization to work for and to work with, and that's therefore enhancing culture and client relationships. Ultimately, all of these factors should combine to generate greater value over time, and that's our objective. Now, in terms of progress and current year ambitions, we released our third responsible business report in September last year. It is comprehensive, it's downloadable on our website, and it gives a clear insight into our progress since publishing our responsible business strategy in October 2021, including us achieving all 15 of the targets that we set for the 2022/2023 period. Other highlights in the report include setting the attainment of net zero emissions by 2040, with interim targets by 2030.
We launched our volunteering policy to enable our colleagues to support causes that are important to each of them. They can choose which cause they want to support, and we'll give them up to 15 hours a year of Gateley time to commit to supporting their chosen cause. We also launched a new charity partnership with Alzheimer's Research U.K., alongside our existing charity partnerships. We further enhanced our partnership with anniversary support to Sports Aid and to UA92, which is a university academy in Manchester focused on students from diverse backgrounds. It's a great organization to be associated with. Maintaining momentum is really important, and we're certain that we can continue to enhance our community impact and make more meaningful progress in relation to those of the Levelling Up goals that relate to our planet. Okay, so moving on to the next slide, please.
Just a handful of people highlights. I mentioned earlier that while we remain cost conscious, we do continue to make deliberate and targeted investment in both capacity and in new expertise, and of course, that means in people. In period, this resulted in total group headcount increasing to just under 1,500 people, of which FTE headcount is now over 1,000, a like-for-like increase of 3.5% at the FTE level. Our career development programs resulted in us making 126 promotions across the group at the beginning of the last half year period. Really encouragingly, approximately 70% of our staff are now either share or option holders in Gateley. A number of people saw historic share-based awards mature during the first half of this financial year, which was really good to see.
It's a very important part of our overall strategy and very much in line with creating wider equity participation for our staff, linked to the growth of our business. Relative to the traditional professional service model, it also provides us with a different way of incentivizing our people, which is helpful, I think, in an environment where it would be a mistake to assume that pay pressure has evaporated in professional services. It's eased, but it remains a characteristic in the market, meaning that it's essential that we return to a bonus culture in this financial year. Particularly important for us to do that, and something that we are absolutely committed to this financial year. Our internal network groups continue to develop and thrive. In period, we launched two new networks, Influence and Ignite.
Both of these are developed to help colleagues build connections and foster collaboration between teams and across platforms. Very much part of familiarization and engendering better cross-sell opportunities on platforms. As we reported last September, Colin Jones has joined our holdings board and has quickly become a valuable member of the holdings board team. This October, this coming October, our Chairman, Nigel Payne, will necessarily retire because his tenure will time out. Nigel's been with us since IPO in 2015, and he continues to be an excellent chairman. That made our search for his successor difficult, but we're delighted to be able to say that David Wilton will join our holdings board at the beginning of February as a non-executive chair-elect. We've released a more detailed about, announcement about David, very recently, which is accessible, on our investor page.
So moving on now to the final slide, summary and outlook. Really just a few brief points, a summation, of course, of what I've said, and a reminder of a couple of the points I made at the beginning of the presentation. So in summary, as this slide reminds us, our H1 results are a further demonstration of our unbroken track record of growth, and we're pleased to be able to maintain the proposed value of our interim dividend of GBP 0.033. Importantly, we continue to invest organically in people and in infrastructure, and I've outlined, alongside Nick and Neil, where some of that investment has been made in the period, down to the end of October last year.
Aided by our strong balance sheet and through both hiring and business acquisition, we continue to invest in our strategy to enhance resilience and differentiate our business via targeted diversification. This is working for us in practice. Consultancy revenue in H1 2024 increased to almost GBP 23 million, being just over 27% of total group revenue in the period. That's from a standing start in 2015, when we had no consultancy revenue in group. There will be a lag in return from some of the investments that we've outlined today. However, investments of the type that we outlined today are an important component in us realizing our long-term ambitions. In the meantime, we do maintain a cautious outlook, and Neil emphasized that when he was talking to us earlier.
That's really because at the moment, macro uncertainty looks like being the dominant characteristic in the near term. This is definitely reflected in the trends that we're seeing in parts of our business as clients continue to... Well, they continue to pause, really, to assess options and priorities. It's most evident in our transactional services teams, where the stagnant environment has lasted longer than anticipated, and we're seeing fewer transactions, typically with longer timelines and less certainty of completion. Added to which, market forces mean more competition between advisors and greater fee pressure. And as I mentioned earlier, in that context, the corporate platform performance is really strong. The guys on that platform performed well in H1. You know, I'm very grateful to them for doing their very best to maximize revenue in a very difficult market.
Our offsets, of course, are in our growing consultancy revenue and in the continuing strengthening of activity in other teams that are more countercyclical or economically agnostic in nature, but with mandates typically taking slightly longer to convert to fees, as Neil mentioned. So overall, market conditions remain challenging, and our immediate outlook is therefore necessarily cautious. However, our medium to long-term outlook is optimistic, and our operational focus now, for the remainder of this financial year, remains firmly on maximizing all revenue opportunities down to the end of April. So thank you all for giving us a bit of time today, and I hope you found that informative and helpful.