Hello, everybody, and welcome to our interim results presentation for the period that ended in March 2022. I'm Paul Scott. I'm the Chief Executive of Renew, and I'm here today with Sean Wyndham-Quin, the group's Chief Financial Officer. In terms of format of the presentation and what we're going to cover, I'll start with an overview and pick out some highlights of the half year results, provide a quick reminder of our business model, our sectors, and our key differentiators. Sean's going to take us through the financials, and then we'll both then provide an overview of our markets and sectors, including what we've achieved and our prospects. We've summarized the progress that we're making on our ESG journey, and finally, I'll conclude the presentation by amplifying the strengths of our investment case and providing an outlook. The deck includes a comprehensive appendix for reference.
So turning to slide two of the deck, we are delighted to be presenting another set of record results for the group that further demonstrate the resilience in our model and our strategy. We have, however, faced a unique set of circumstances over this period. It should be remembered that the U.K. faced significant disruption as a consequence of the Omicron variant, actually, that hit the country in December and into January. But more recently, of course, we have felt the impact of changes in the macroeconomic environment, and of course, this has been further exacerbated by geopolitical events. The associated headwinds of inflation and material availability are being felt by all, but as I hope we are able to amplify as we turn the pages on the presentation, we continue to manage these challenges without any material impact on our trading.
J. Browne, the company we acquired in March of last year, is now fully integrated and performing very strongly, almost ahead of expectation. We are reporting record revenue levels, record operating profit with our operating margins in line with our expectation. Our earnings are up 14% to the comparative period. Cash generation has been strong in the first half of the year. Sean will come on to that in a little more detail. And our order book has grown, and this is providing really good momentum as we move into the second half of our year. And reflecting the confidence in the progress and our prospects, we've increased the interim dividend that is up by 17% to the comparative period. And on this first slide, we actually see our 10, now 10 independently branded subsidiaries listed.
So turning to slide three, well, it's here that we've illustrated some representative images of the sectors we operate across, directly delivering our very wide range of multidisciplinary services. We continue to describe our markets across the five strands of rail, of infrastructure, which includes our highways and telecommunications activities, with a new strand emerging in aviation, and more of this shortly. In energy, environmental, and our specialist building activities remain focused on high-quality residential and science in London and the Southeast. On to slide four. Well, it's here that we amplify our differentiators. These are key ingredients to our ongoing success. In summary, our chosen markets have regulated long-term funding characteristics, and a really important point, maintenance and renewal services remain mission critical on the networks where we operate. Our OpEx-focused activities have much lower risk profile and inherent inflation protection compared with capital programs.
We're not heavily commodity or material dependent, and the vast majority of our contractual terms are actual cost recovery based on long-term framework arrangements. And our task sizes are relatively small in size, and the execution time frames are, again, relatively short, again, giving us protection against the inflationary pressure. Our direct resources are deployed into very complex and challenging environments where the barriers to new entrants is incredibly high. Our compound earnings growth is demonstrable proof of the resilience in our model, even under the current extremely challenging economic circumstances. And finally, we're both responsive and innovative, constantly seeking out improvements in value and delivery effectiveness. Actually, we're hosting a day to industry to showcase some of our expertise, expertise in this innovative area at the end of the month. Sean?
Hello, everyone. If we flip over onto slide six, I'll give you a brief overview of the P&L for the six months. Group revenue was up to GBP 414 million, up 13% in the period. That included a strong contribution from Browne, which contributed approximately GBP 40 million of revenue. The adjusted operating profit was up 18% to GBP 26 million, and that compares to the same time last year of GBP 22 million, but includes a contribution from Browne of GBP 2.9 million. Our adjusted operating profit margin is 6.3% versus 6% last year. And what I would say is we always talk about our adjusted operating profit margin being around 6.5%.
I'd expect the full year number to be possibly slightly ahead of that, as we expect to see slightly better margins in the second half of the year due to the nature of the activities that we'll be undertaking over the summer months. Our adjusted EPS is up 14.6% to GBP 0.262 , and our interim dividend is up 17% to GBP 0.567. If you do the usual 1/3, 2/3 split, that would imply a full-year dividend of GBP 0.17 versus the GBP 0.16 we paid last year. We've done a last twelve months return on capital employed and return on invested capital calculation, which gives us a ROTCE of 30% and ROIC of 29%, which is clearly significantly ahead of our weighted average cost of capital.
On slide seven, we've set out our long term, so the last 10 years, EPS track record. And as you can see, we have consistently delivered EPS growth over a long period of time. But the really important metric on this slide is the net debt to EBITDA ratio across the bottom. And what you can see is, despite making all of those acquisitions and delivering all of that earnings growth, we've managed to maintain a net debt to EBITDA ratio of less than 1x. In fact, we've never at any point during the last 10 years gone above that 1x net debt to EBITDA.
As you can see at the very end of the table there, the first half of this year is obviously materially ahead of where we were at the first half of last year, and that clearly implies that we'll full year EPS will be ahead of where we were in 2021. On the balance sheet, our pre-IFRS 16 net debt was GBP 1.2 million at the half year. This compares to GBP 13.7 million at the full year 2021, and GBP 16.9 million at the same time last year.
Clearly, the strong cash generation is a hallmark of our business and something we're, we're confident will continue throughout the second half of the year, and we're very confident in returning to a net cash position by the end of the financial year, which is in line with the consensus forecast in the city. The good news, we took out a GBP 35 million term loan in May 2018, which was used to part-fund the QTS acquisition, and I'm pleased to say that we have fully repaid that loan during the last six months. On an IFRS 16 basis, our net debt was GBP 15.6 million at the half year versus GBP 29.3 million at the full year.
So on an IFRS 16 basis, as well as a pre-IFRS 16 basis, a significant reduction in the net debt over the last six months. The other bit of good news, which happened shortly after the period end, was the buy-in of the Amco pension scheme liabilities. You will recall that we bought in our much larger scheme, the Lovell scheme, the liabilities in November 2020, and at that time we indicated that we were looking to achieve the same outcome on the Amco scheme. I'm really pleased to say that that has now happened, and what that means is that across both of our pension schemes, all of the liabilities are now, are now matched with the corresponding annuity. Importantly, that means no more monthly pension contributions.
We contributed GBP 300,000 into the Amco scheme in the first half of the year, but there will be no further contributions required. Not that long ago, just to remind you all, we were paying approximately GBP 5 million a year into those schemes, so it's a significant improvement both in our cash flow going forward, but also clearly in the de-risking of the balance sheet, which is equally important. We have also increased our provision against discontinued activities in Allenbuild. We put through a GBP 1.1 million addition to that provision in the first half of the year.
On the cash flow, we've put in the bridge that we've been using for the last few years, which bridges our opening net debt position of GBP 13.7 million to the closing position of GBP 1.2 million. As you can see, we generated GBP 31 million of profits during the first half of the year, with a small working capital outflow of GBP 2.4 million and a bit of CapEx. I would note that the CapEx is below where we had anticipated it being, and that's largely being driven by issues with supply. And we're placing lots of orders for CapEx, for plants, for vehicles, and it's just not arriving. So, we are continuing to invest. We'd hoped to spend approximately GBP 6 million in the first half of the year.
As you can see, we've fallen way short of that, but it's not for want of placing orders. It's simply that the, those orders are not materializing into deliveries. The GBP 300,000 pension contributions I mentioned earlier is there, as well as the GBP 8.8 million dividend, and this is the final dividend that we paid in March last year, for the final dividend for FY 2021. GBP 3.5 million of tax, and then a bit of, HP and interest and other, and that gets us back to our net debt position of GBP 1.2 million at the half year.
We're now going to take a look at our 5 sectors in a little bit more detail, with an operational review for each of these segments, with a high-level description of the services that we provide, as well as the size of the opportunity that we see in these sectors, where we are specifically focused and the progress that we are making. We'll start with rail, which is on slide 11. Rail represents about 40% of the total group revenues, where operating margins are typically 9%. We've just commenced the fourth year of the control period cycle, CP6. This is a 5-year control period in which Network Rail were allocated GBP 53 billion, a significant increase over and above the previous allocation during CP5.
But more important from our point of view, with a greater focus on operating, maintaining, renewing, the network of things that we do. As anticipated, as we move through the control period cycle, we've seized growth opportunities, as we've moved into year four. Our multidisciplinary rail offering is now very compelling. We've recently secured two-year extensions on our principal frameworks in CAM, our signal asset management frameworks, and our renewal frameworks in LNE routes and in Scotland. We've extended both of those by two years, or the client has extended them by two years, which takes us through to 2026 and into 2027. We continue to invest in innovative solutions to deliver routine operations in a more cost-effective and productive way.
This is predominant through our RRV fleet and some pictures in the deck of various examples of this. During winter, we had a relatively benign winter, but we did respond to numerous climate-related events through those winter months. I suppose a standout item would be the blockage on the Cambrian Line, which suffered as a consequence of a washout. We recovered that in a matter of weeks and got that line operating relatively quickly in the aftermath of Storm Franklin. A key current focus for the group and a new real opportunity for Renew will emerge from the electrification program as part of the U.K.'s decarbonization agenda. It is estimated this will involve over 15,000 single track kilometers of electrification by 2040. This is a multi-billion GBP commitment.
REL, the small acquisition we made in June of last year, they've integrated very well, and already they're collaborating very actively with our two rail brands. We're already appointed to overhead line programs in the Northeast and in Scotland, and more recently on the Midland Main Line. In summary, our rail activity is in really good shape to face up to and take advantage of growth opportunity as we move through the end of the current control period and into the next cycle. I'm going to turn to our infrastructure sector on slide 12, where you see that we report our highways and our telecommunications activities, and where we'll be reporting our progress in aviation, a relatively new market sector for Renew. These activities represent about 20% of our total group revenue, and operating margins from these three strands within infrastructure are typically 6%.
In highways, we remain focused on the strategic highway network. We just commenced year three of the current RIS2 control period, where National Highways were allocated just over GBP 24 billion, a significant increase over their previous control period cycle. We hold five lots on the new SDF, scheme delivery frameworks, the maximum allowable allocation of lots, where we're providing civil engineering, road restraint systems, and drainage nationally for this extremely important client. And in the period, we were awarded two further lots on a seven-year national technical surveys and testing framework, giving you an idea of the width and breadth of capability we have in that sector. Wireless telecommunications, there's a very ambitious GBP 30 billion program of investment to deliver gigabit speeds nationally, and this includes 4G and 5G, the areas that we are involved in.
We built an extremely strong position as a leading ADC, an acquisition design and construction provider in the mobile telecommunications market. In the period, we continued to expand our framework base with a new award from Three UK and from Vodafone. This is to complement our other Tier One positions with the other major network operators, so a really strong foundation and position in that segment. In aviation, the relatively new strand of work for Renew, following a recent investment in capability, we've invested in some equipment and some people to organically push into this new area for us.
But more importantly, following a long procurement campaign, we are now able to report the appointment to Manchester Airports Group's five-year, GBP 700 million framework for civils, medium-sized civil frameworks at Manchester, Stansted, and at the East Midlands facility. And also in the period, again, after a procurement campaign, we've been appointed to a program of work, similar type of work, airside, working on the airside assets at Leeds Bradford Airport. Moving to energy, on slide 13, these represent about 10% of total group revenues, and again, our operating margins are consistently in and around 6% in this segment. The sector is dominated by our work in the civil nuclear program in the UK. The vast majority of our services are associated with non-discretionary, high hazard risk reduction and the decommissioning services that we provide.
This is underpinned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's annual commitment. Currently, GBP 3 billion is committed, with a life estimate of GBP 124 billion to eradicate the scale of this liability. Over 75% of this annual commitment continues to be committed towards Sellafield, where we've operated for well over 80 years and where we expect to be there for another 80 years and beyond. Demand here continues to grow for our very wide range of specialist engineering services, including our fabrication and manufacturing capabilities to the highest nuclear standards. Sellafield are also now committed to a major increase in expenditure by the PPP, the Project Partnership Program, and we're making good progress in positioning the business to be associated with the growth opportunities in that new strand of work.
In line with the long-term strategic objective, we are successfully expanding our civil nuclear client base, which now includes Hinkley Point C. We're working at Dounreay, we're working at Springfields, it's a fuel production facility at the Low Level Waste Repository at Drigg, and we've more recently been appointed in the period at Aldermaston. Outside of nuclear, we look after some conventional generating assets, but an important strand to pick out actually in the period is our work, growing demand for our work in the specialist hydro tunnel maintenance and renewal services sector. We do this in the Scotland region through frameworks, and we've seen an increased demand. We're now appointed to a number of projects in that region.
And the final point I would make in energy is the fact that we continue to significantly invest in understanding the market in U.K. electric vehicle infrastructure. I think the skill sets that we have, our national footprint, lend itself to having an opportunity here for growth. It's a new market area. We are currently putting a lot of cost into this area. I think it's right that we understand the scale and and where the opportunity is for Renew and its brands. It's early days yet, but we are making that commitment. And our fourth engineering strand are environmental services. Again, these represent about 20% of our total group-
... revenue. Again, operating margins, there are a number of strands in this segment, but reliable operating margins in and around 6%, from this segment. The key opportunity in environmental activities are driven by the GBP 51 billion of investment in AMP7, which runs through to 2025. In addition, we're seeing a significant prioritization for flood alleviation and coastal defensive programs, and it's here that we also report our specialist restoration activities. In water, we very successfully broadened our customer base. We're now operational in 11 of the U.K.'s 25 water regions.
Browne, as I said in the introduction, have integrated extremely well and are performing a little ahead of our expectations with numerous framework awards since joining the group, including at Affinity Water, where they've recently been appointed to their four-year below ground assets framework worth in the order of GBP 8 million per year. We've just commenced year three of the current asset management program cycle, and workflow that we recalibrated in the aftermath of the disruption caused by COVID, it's actually as we predicted to be at this point in the cycle. We're already focused on the anticipated growth opportunities towards the end of AMP7 in the remaining couple of years, but more importantly, into AMP8 and the opportunities from 2025 and beyond. In flood alleviation, we've grown our client base. We're now working for the Environment Agency, Canal & River Trust.
We're working for Scottish Canals, and more recently, appointed to Natural Resources Wales, and all of these customers have a growing work bank and a priority in terms of, eliminating flood alleviation, problems in their respective regions, all of course, linked to the challenge of climate change. In restoration, we continue to seize emerging and see emerging opportunities at the Parliamentary Estate, where we've worked for many years, delivering very specialist services. Victoria Tower and Lords' Room are our current, key targets, and elsewhere in this very specialized area of our, service provision, working at Manchester Town Hall, working at Tollcross up in Glasgow, and, now live on site at the Botanic Gardens up at Edinburgh, providing very specialist restoration and conservation services.
Our other reporting segment is our specialist building activities, and here we talk about our science and high-quality residential business.
This business is trading relatively well during the period. The largest scheme we're working on is building new laboratories for the MRC at Hammersmith Hospital. That program is going very well. We anticipate that concluding in the autumn. The high-quality residential market remains buoyant despite the wider economic issues and the issues with Russia, and our order book is reasonably strong, and we have a number of schemes that are currently live and performing very well. Our focus here continues to be on contract selectivity and risk management. Fundamentally, the business is performing well and at a scale and margin that we're comfortable with. Flipping over to ESG, we have for a couple of years now set out our commitment to ESG through committing to five key commitments.
These are support local communities, customer value, climate action, engage our people, and operate responsibly. About 18 months ago, we set out some hard quantitative targets, and we promised that what we would do every year is report on performance against those targets. Those targets are set out here, on this page, just to remind you as to what they are. At the half year now, what we're gonna do is just give you a flavor of some of the things that we're doing in order to help achieve those targets, but we're not gonna be reporting quantitatively against the targets that we previously set.
The only other point to mention is that we continue to be recipient of the London Stock Exchange Green Economy Mark, making us one of only a handful of companies on the, on the Exchange that's been awarded this distinction. In terms of our progress within supporting local communities, I'm pleased to say that this is an area that we didn't perform very well in last year, but we've seen significant improvements this year, and the reason we struggled last year was because of COVID. As you can imagine, it was very difficult to attend schools and colleges and to engage in STEM events when the social distancing restrictions were in place and so on.
So pleased to say those numbers are improving, and we expect to see, you know, as we move past Omicron and all of those restrictions, for that to continue to improve. The picture here is some of our colleagues working to clean up Enfield Lock. We have an ongoing commitment to maintain part of that waterway, which includes, you know, cutting back the vegetation, keeping the pathways clean, picking up litter, and so on. So as part of our community engagement, it's a great example of it, really. In terms of customer value, well, the best way for us to measure whether we're delivering good value for our customers is: are we being awarded repeat contracts?
I'm pleased to say that we continue, and Paul touched on them in his segment, we continue to be awarded new frameworks and new projects with our existing customer base. We've recently deployed the Mega Vac, which is pictured here, and this is something we've had really positive response back from our customers. The Mega Vac is a RRV, so a road rail vehicle, that is deployed to the railway network, to manage the drainage. And the advantage of it is that it's far, vastly more efficient than traditional methods, and this is a unique piece of kit, that has been custom-built, for us, and which nobody else has anything like on the network. In terms of climate action, I'm pleased to say we've made really good progress in this area.
And one of the key things we've done is to significantly roll out the use of hydrotreated vegetable oil across our sites and across our activities. We trialed the use of HVO fuel on a compound in Wales last year. We found that it worked very successfully. It significantly reduced our carbon footprint, and we are now rolling that out across the group. What this entails is installing HVO fuel tanks across our sites, across our fixed sites, as well as some of our longer-term compounds, and we'll be using that for both our commercial fleet and for our plants. And that will contribute significantly to a reduction in CO₂. We've been introducing sustainable site setups more widely across the group.
So this involves things like water recycling, solar panels, and the use of batteries on site to enable us to run the generator for less time. And then the other key movement in this space is the continued rollout of hybrid and electric options on our company cars, with a clear medium-term goal that in a few years' time, we'll stop offering petrol and diesel vehicles on the company car schemes. In terms of engaging our people, we've significantly increased the number of mental health first aiders we have across the group. And also importantly, we've rolled out and relaunched a number of our graduate schemes.
And the purpose of the relaunch really was to ensure that we are attracting a wider, more diverse pool of talent to come and work in our business. We've continued the expansion of our executive training program called RISE, which we started last year, and that's been a very successful program. Some of the executive training that we've brought in-house, and we're widening that to an ever-increasing cohort of individuals that are being put through that training program. In terms of operate responsibly, it is always our goal to ensure that we have no accidents or incidents on any of our sites or in any of our activities. And a part of that, we've been reacting with behavioral science initiatives.
So what we're trying to do is look at the root causes as to why people do things that cause accidents, and try to help individuals and help our teams and help, you know, our colleagues, not do things that are gonna cause injuries to themselves or to others. We continue to use mandatory waste brokers across the business. This is mandatory now, and with the purpose of ensuring that we send as little waste as possible to landfill, and most of that waste is recycled. And then finally, but very importantly, we're pleased to say that we've launched a group-wide diversity forum during the course of this year. And the purpose here is really to help us achieve our diversity targets and serious progress we've made during the course of the last six months.
In concluding the presentation, looking at slide 19, where we set out and amplify the strengths of our investment case, I think it's appropriate to pick out some themes. Hopefully, we've amplified why our model is very different to others operating in these sectors. We have a much lower risk profile, to reiterate that point again, because of the services we provide and our direct delivery model. Our record trading is evidence of our ability to manage our way through a global pandemic and now economic challenging circumstances. And we have consistently executed to strategy, which has delivered reliable earnings growth, as Sean illustrated in the financial section, for over 10 years. Our markets have high barriers to new entrants and underpinned by resilient long-term and reliable growth dynamics.
And finally, we remain committed to growing the business, both organically and acquisitively, albeit with a very disciplined approach to risk and a well-defined criteria, actually, criteria set out at the back of the appendix. And finally, as an outlook, you know, we continue to see compelling long-term growth opportunities across U.K. infrastructure, where funding is underpinned by national need as well as regulatory obligation. And of course, we see growth opportunities are now driven by the green infrastructure agenda, where, for example, the decarbonization of the rail network will have a major role to play. It's a really good example of another driver that's playing the dynamic of one of our key markets. The resilience in our model is now extremely well-proven, and we continue to manage the inflationary pressures without any material impact on trading.
Supported by a strong order book, we can report positive momentum as we move into the second half of our year, and we very much look forward with confidence to delivering further successful growth. Thank you for listening.