are over. Home at last!
Okay, I think we're just about ready to start. Some room at the front here. Anybody wants to move at the front? There's always this reluctance to sit at the front. We can take your coat, if you'd like.
Thank you.
I'm sure somebody can help you with that. Okay, great. Well, thank you everybody for being here promptly. I think we are recording live now. So good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Phil Bentley, I'm Mitie's CEO, and I'm delighted to welcome you here to our headquarters in the Shard for our 2023 capital markets update, the theme of which, as we will show, is From Facilities Management to Facilities Transformation. Welcome also to those of you joining remotely via the webcast. Now, I'm here with the Mitie leadership team. Alongside Simon Kirkpatrick, we have our functional leaders, Maria Winn, our Chief Marketing Officer; Cijo Joseph, our Chief Technology and Information Officer; Pete Dickinson, our Chief Legal Officer.
Now, Jasmine Hudson, our Chief People Officer, can't be with us today, as she welcomed a new baby girl to her family yesterday. Kate Sherwin. Where's Kate? Somewhere. She's still... Kate, over there. Our IR Director will ensure that we stick to our allotted times. Our operational MDs are there at the back: Jason Towse, our MD of Business Services; Alice Woodwark, MD of... Where's Alice? Alice, there she is, MD of our Communities business; Brian Talbot, our MD of Central Government & Defence and Simon Venn, our MD of Technical Services, alongside Mark Caskey, our MD of Mitie Projects. Dan Guest, our Group Operations Director, or GOD, as we call him, makes up the complete executive team. Now, we've split our time today into five sessions.
Session one, I'll be laying out the new strategic direction, and after a coffee break in session two, rather than just simply jumping into our divisional reporting units, I want us to cover the investments that we've been making, we've been making, which give us our service line leadership in cleaning, in security, in engineering, and in projects capabilities. These are the capabilities which run through all four of our divisional reporting units, ensuring we are consistently deploying best practice across each divisional reporting unit is a key element of our facilities transformation strategy. Session three is a breakout session with another coffee, you'll be pleased to know, in our transformation hub at the back of the room there. This is where we showcase the technology which is underpinning our facilities transformation strategy.
Session four is a panel session here at the front, looking at Mitie not from a service line or a technology perspective, but rather from a customer perspective. Highlighting how we are building sector-led products and sector-led expertise. There'll be time here for questions to the divisional MDs on the panel at that time. Session five is where Simon Kirkpatrick brings it all together and sets out our financial ambitions and our financial targets, and we'll have a full Q&A session at the end when I wrap up at the, at the end of the day. And when we're done, please do stay for a glass with some wine tasting with the team. So sit back, relax, ask lots of questions, I'm sure you will, and welcome to Mitie's new strategic plan for FY 25 to FY 27.
Now, it's been four years since we last held a Capital Markets Day. It was actually December 2019, that those of you were here. And not surprisingly, a lot has changed in Mitie since then. In those four years, I'm pleased to say actually that Mitie has prospered. We've reshaped the portfolio, scaling the business through the acquisitions, first of VSG and then of Interserve. We made strategic investments in decarbonization, intelligence, security, telecoms, and environmental services, and we've exited a number of non-core businesses. We've invested heavily in our technology platform, as Cijo will show, and we've delivered significant cost savings through a number of margin enhancement initiatives, which Simon will highlight, and we've transformed our back office processing efficiencies. Finally, we've added a number of many new high-quality clients.
We're in the business of developing long-standing, deep relationships, and any one of these new clients is an absolute privilege for us to serve. However, it's not all been plain sailing. There have been numerous headwinds on the right there. In the early days, slow economic growth caused the sector distress, which saw the demise of both Carillion and Interserve. We've had Brexit, we've had COVID, we've had supply chain disruptions and shortages, wage inflation, and the cost of living crisis. So it's certainly been a fairly turbulent period. But through it all, I'd like to think that we at Mitie have demonstrated our resilience and our agility as a business. And as the chart on the bottom right shows, we've delivered a 12.5% TSR compound annual growth for our shareholders during this period, significantly outperforming the market.
We've also significantly exceeded the stretching targets that we set, which when you consider that CMD was 2019, was just before COVID hit, was actually a pretty good performance. In the four years since, we have comfortably beaten our medium-term guidance for revenue growth, for cash flow, for customer and employee satisfaction, and for indebtedness. 1, 2, 3, if you remember, was our long-term strategic vision. Number 1, to become the market leader. Number 2, having less than 2 times TFO, total financial obligations, and more than GBP 200 million of EBITDA. And number 3, generating at least GBP 3 billion of revenue, annual revenue. I'm so pleased to say we've delivered that vision, which is why it's time now to move on to our new strategic plan.
Simon will show we will hit the 4.5% margin target in the second half of FY 2024. That's probably been the most challenging target that we'd set at the time, and, and this is, you know, the fact that we brought in Interserve, which had much more much lower margins than, than Mitie, and we've obviously put up with high inflation, and we've done well in passing through pricing to clients. But we've still added some GBP 500 million of revenue at flat to net mar to negative margin. So that has diluted our operating profit margin. So that's where we've come from. Let me turn now to where we are today, and then I'll get stuck into where we're heading. Firstly, I think it's worth reminding ourselves that although we operate in a competitive market, it is an attractive one nevertheless.
I'm focusing here just on the UK FM market, but that's over 95% of our group revenues. The UK market is the largest, most developed and dynamic market in Europe. Not many markets you can say that about, but that's one of them. The UK has the highest rates of outsourcing with integrated or bundled contracts, the norm, and the market's consolidating with a growing number of M&A deals, which we think is always a good sign for the industry. And this is the market, the UK market, where Mitie has a position of clear leadership. We've doubled market share since the 2019 Capital Markets Day. Now, Frost & Sullivan forecasts that the UK market will grow at about 3.7% per annum on a go-forward basis.
Not that exciting, I agree, but what I think is exciting to me is that integrated FM contracts, a Mitie strength, are growing faster, as are technical services, security, energy, energy services, environment. Again, Mitie's service line strengths and Mitie's sector strengths, life sciences, TMT, defense, and healthcare, are also growing at a faster rate. And as you know, we're targeting our M&A spend on the macro trends of decarbonization, telecoms, evolving workspaces, repurposing the grid. All areas of focus for our Projects business, which Mark Caskey will talk about a little bit further on. And also on data centers. And here, mechanical, electrical, fire, and security packages are over 70% of the build cost of a data center, and that's the area we're focusing on. Elsewhere, defense spending is up, as Brian will cover.
The Protect Duty, combating business crime, is a challenge that Jason and his team are addressing head-on. Immigration services are expanding, and in the circular economy, continues to open up new income streams for Mitie in sustainability, as this week's small cleaning waste acquisition demonstrates. In short, we believe we are well positioned to grow at a faster pace than the market. Another key driver for growth is the focus from our shareholders and customers on all things ESG, environmental, social, and governance issues, which is why I'm delighted that Mitie's recognized as a leader in our industry in ESG among global FM companies. ESG initiatives form a key part of how Mitie does business, ensuring we grow sustainably and responsibly. We employ over 64,000 colleagues and work with over 3,000 customers, so we really can make a positive difference to the lives, to the lives of many.
Our social value framework, based on the UNHCR directives, is centered around five pillars: environment, people, responsible site, supply chain, and community, all underpinned by our relentless drive for innovation. On environment, we have one of the U.K.'s largest EV fleets and the most ambitious net zero targets in the market, targets which have been validated by the prestigious Science-Based Targets Initiative. On people, we offer industry-leading benefits to our colleagues to attract and retain the best talent. We know that what we're doing for our people is hitting the mark, because we're achieving record levels of employee engagement, falling levels of attrition. In responsible supply chain, we work collaboratively with around 8,000 suppliers, and all of our suppliers have access to our Coupa procurement platform, requiring them to comply with Mitie's social value policy.
Over 40% of our spend is shared with SMEs, and we spend around GBP 5 million a year with VCSEs, Voluntary Community Social Enterprises. The role we play in leveling up the communities we serve is hugely important as well. We have over 1,100 apprentices, and our flagship Ready2 Work program supports ex-service personnel, ex-offenders, wider groups of people finding or facing barriers to work. 3.5% of our colleagues come from the Armed Forces background, and we encourage volunteering in the local community. I think that's why we've had great recognition for what we are doing at Mitie. We've got leading ESG ratings from the likes of Sustainalytics, CDP, and MSCI, and we continue to win many awards, such as Top Employer for the sixth year running, Most Diverse Company, Leading Apprenticeship Employer.
We've just become members of the 5% Club. So 5% of our employees in earn-to-learn schemes. Finally, our 2025 Plan Zero initiative has just been recognized by the ESG Investing Awards as the top zero, zero carbon strategy in FTSE 250. Please don't think that ESG is just about table stakes. It certainly isn't. It's the work we do here in ESG that gives us a competitive edge when bidding for new business. This is our world today, as we launch our new three-year plan, and it is a world of opportunity, as I've shown, hopefully. It's also a world that's changing and changing fast. Our clients aren't satisfied anymore with just facilities management. They want facilities transformation, and our mission is to be the U.K. leader in facilities transformation. What exactly is facilities transformation?
What will it mean for our clients over the next five years? How will it impact the industry we serve, and what is Mitie's response going to be? They're some of the questions that we'll be answering here today. Now, at Mitie, we approach facilities transformation from three different angles, transforming the built environment, transforming the lived experience, and transforming insights and decision-making. And although it's technology that is underpinning facilities transformation, what's far more important is what it means to our customers. A certain Steve Jobs said: "You've got to start with customer first and then work back to technology." And that's what we've done at Mitie, focusing on the five key need states, as we call them, of our customers, capturing the essence of what our customers really need. What our customers need first is optimized asset performance and maximum productivity from their asset base.
This means building automation, remote monitoring, BIM, digital twins, AI, data analytics, answering the question: How does my estate compare to best in class? How much must I spend to upgrade it, to optimize performance? Second, our customers need a transformed lived experience across their estate, a great place to work, user-centric, commute-worthy, with space optimized and flexed to meet their changing, changing needs. Answering the question: How do I attract talent to my estate and optimize hybrid working? And after the pandemic, thirdly, customers need healthier, more sustainable spaces, real-time tracking of occupancy or spill incidents, zero waste, robotic cleaning, flex to meet demand. And customers need protection. Protection both of their people, protection of their assets, better risk assurance, perimeter hardening, facial recognition, AI cameras, mapping behaviors, analyzing theft patterns. And finally, notwithstanding recent UK government announcements, customers need facilities which accelerate their path to zero.
Customers know that 40% of the world's carbon emissions come from the built estate, so they need renewable energy, battery storage, EVs, even energy independence, algorithms to optimize uptake and usage. Answering the question: How do I decarbonize at the lowest cost? So for us, this is facilities transformation. For a landlord, it means what property technology will help me to maximize rent? And, for a tenant, it means, how can PropT ech take my fixed property costs and make them variable? So welcome to our facilities transformation model. We call it The MitieVerse. At the center is our Shard headquarters. There it is. The heart of our decision-making, where we bring our marketing and our technology insights together, where our customers and our tech partners challenge our thinking. And informing this facilities transformation thinking is Mitie's digital technology platform.
This is where our technology architecture is built, where—I'm looking for the high resolution, it doesn't seem to be there, it's been lost. Where product development and automation of service delivery begins, where data is shared, analyzed, and processed straight through. Developing software to optimize both workflow and workforce management, where our core finance, HR, procurement, and IT systems feed into our data lakes, informing our decision-making through machine learning, generative AI. Hopefully, it's clearer in the book. The next layer is also incredibly important to us. It's the technology partnerships we've established with global IT companies such as Microsoft, Vodafone, IBM, ServiceNow, Wipro, Salesforce.com. Committing to these long-term strategic relationships has been key to Mitie's technology progression. Just this week, for example, we've entered into a strategic partnership with Salesforce.com to provide net zero carbon reporting to our clients.
It's this digital platform then that supports our market-leading service line capabilities. Cleaning, backed by our Cleaning and Hygiene Centre of Excellence. Security, backed by our ISOC in Northampton. Engineering, backed by our TSOC in Manchester, and projects with our new Project Centre of Excellence in Birmingham. Taken together, ensuring consistent delivery in our service lines. And finally, we move to the outer zone, to the sectors, recognizing that hospitals and life sciences have the highest hygiene demands, that retailers and manufacturers need real-time data analytics. That critical infrastructure and data centers need the highest levels of energy, resilience, and security. That defense operates in a unique environment with bespoke security hosting challenges. This is what sectorization is all about: developing facilities transformation products that meet the needs of all our customers in each of these different sectors.
You'll hear more about these concepts in the panel discussion and see them in the transformation hub. Now, what is clear in our vision for facilities transformation is that it is centered on growth, and we think of this growth in three distinct pillars. Block one relates to key account growth. Our foundations are built on our wide range of blue-chip key accounts. Key accounts are our lifeblood, stable, long-term, annuity-like income. We enjoy high win rates and high retention rates, as you'll hear from Maria, and a strong order book. We only get to transform a client's estate, though, if we've won the core FM contract. So that is our first focus for growth, adding new major key accounts every year. We've added 4 key accounts so far this year, NATS, National Grid, DIO in Germany, and Phoenix.
Together, they have the potential to add GBP 200 million of revenue each year to our business. With our growing pipeline and better visibility of future leads, we're targeting adding more new key accounts each year of our new three-year plan. With our leading capabilities, economies of scale, technology leadership, winning new accounts provides the largest uplift in revenue over our three, three-year plan. Block two relates to projects upsell, and I'm really excited about our growing cross-selling and upselling capabilities. Consult, design, build, and maintain is our mantra, helping our clients transform their built estate. And as Mark will show you, our Projects business is growing, and growing rapidly, and we have exciting plans for the future projects growth in our new three-year plan. Finally, block three, in-fill M&A.
These are areas where we'd like to add niche capabilities or add to the scale of what we already have, participating in high growth, higher margin adjacencies. I mentioned in our FY 23 prelims presentation over summer, that we intended to increase in-fill M&A at Mitie, given our successful track record of integration, while maintaining an entrepreneurial culture and providing financing from our strong balance sheet. So how does our new facilities transformation strategy translate into our next set of medium-term financial targets? Well, Simon will take you through the details, so I'll just be the warmer act here. But here's the point: at Mitie, we set targets that are ambitious but attainable, demanding but doable. Targets that we believe we can deliver, as we did when we set out our targets in the CMD 2019.
Targets that we believe will once again translate into superior shareholder returns. As I've said, our facilities transformation strategy and our three pillars are focused on growth, so therefore, we should expect strong financial performance of accelerated revenue growth, accelerated operating margin growth, and growth in cash flow generation. As Simon will show, these targets are significantly higher than those being forecasted by the market today. But our new facilities transformation strategy isn't about growth at any cost. We will continue to be disciplined in our capital allocation strategy, maintaining a strong balance sheet with low leverage, ensuring all acquisitions provide high returns on invested capital. As I said, Simon will provide the details, so I think that's probably enough for me as a start. I hope it's given you a taster of what's to come.
I hope that you find today interesting and come away with a better understanding of the opportunity we see within facilities transformation and the stretching ambition of Mitie's new three-year plan. Thank you for your support. I look forward to your questions at the end of the day. With that, I'm delighted to introduce you to Maria Winn, our Chief Marketing Officer. Maria is going to talk about our marketing strategy and how we accelerate growth.
Well, thank you, Phil, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm Maria Winn, Mitie's Chief Marketing Officer. I've been here at Mitie for two years, and before that, I was at Vodafone, where I led commercial marketing teams there. I've been doing this for about 20 years, but mostly in technology and telco companies. This is my first time in a facilities transformation company. As Phil outlined in his opening address, our focus for the next three years is on driving organic growth through acquiring new customers and increasing the lifetime value with us. I'm going to demonstrate how we deliver that growth through how we accelerate our sales and use the marketing strategy to deliver on it. I'll also delve further into the customer needs that Phil introduced us to. I'm going to start by sharing a summarized view of our sales process.
By aligning to this clear process, this is how we drive each stage, and it makes us really strong at winning new business. We've got four key stages in our sales process: Find, how we identify and qualify new customers; Win, how we convert them to a paying customer; Grow, how we increase their lifetime value; and then finally, Keep, how we make sure that our customers stay with us at renewal time. So this wheel frames all the major components of delivering customer-based growth. I'm going to give you some more detail and some examples for each one in turn. I'll demonstrate that we are strong at winning new business and give confidence in the path that lies ahead, achieving our revenue growth over the next three years. We're going to start with Mitie's value proposition.
It's what differentiates us and why customers really value working with us, and it's a crucial part of the Find process. At Mitie, we want to lead the era of facilities transformation, and as you've just heard from Phil, this means, this means leading in technology. To communicate this, we use a really simple formula to explain our approach, and we call it the Science of Service. It's the combination of innovation and intelligence, and by intelligence, we mean data. That means that we can do things better for our clients and drive real, tangible impact. The Science of Service is our way of explaining why and how we put technology at the heart of our offer. And throughout today, you're going to hear a lot more about it. But for us, it is more than just words.
This value proposition has real practical applications, and we brought this to life through a large-scale campaign. Here at the bottom of the slide, you can see three examples of the work we do in schools and hospitals and the decarbonization space, which we featured in our campaign. Our work on telling our story and making clear our value proposition, which has been backed up by a large advertising campaign, has resulted in us being number one now for brand awareness and brand consideration. In this survey, we asked customers, potential customers: Have you heard of Mitie, and would you consider working for us? These measures are really key drivers of the early stages of the sales process. Good awareness and consideration cements our credibility in a relatively crowded and mature market. It becomes the salesperson that never sleeps, selling the benefits of Mitie night and day.
However, it only opens the door so far. We then need to convert these conversations to opportunities through our sales team, and we're really strong here, too. We've expanded our pipeline by 34% since 2021, or if you prefer absolute numbers, that's some GBP 4.5 billion in incremental pipeline. As we enter the new strategy period, the brand strength I just showed you will make sure that we continue to accelerate. We've been building new sales capability to hunt new opportunities in the market. Our outbound sales team focuses on developing early-stage opportunities, and because many of the problems we help our clients with go beyond traditional facilities buyers, we're speaking now to HR directors about talent and retention. We're speaking to heads of sustainability about net zero. These are board-level issues, and it shows you just how far the category has come.
Our sales development program now includes new apprenticeships alongside our ongoing broader talent development. We make sure that we continue to grow our sales capability. Frictionless sales is about creating smooth and streamlined sales processes, removing barriers both for our customers and our sellers. Some examples here include new perfect pitches for our salespeople and a new content library, providing well-structured and concise materials. Our expanding pipeline is great, but clearly, we need to convert that to sale. Let's now talk about winning. The figures on the right-hand side are our win rates of brand new customers at 27%. When we add in the new business that we win from our existing customer base, this rises to a remarkable 61%. These have been driven by five key focus areas.
Taking benchmarking and data analytics, well, as the UK's largest FM provider, we gather a vast amount of data in our day-to-day operations. We've created a tool that helps us, that helps us create sharper pricing and adapt our bid strategy, so that we create more winning proposals. Our customer-facing teams are real subject matter experts in their fields. Two examples: We have over 200 energy experts in our Net Zero practice, and in our security business, as another example, we have many ex-military, ex-intelligence service, and ex-police force colleagues. And this is a really important credibility point, because the buyers in that space are themselves coming from that background. On the topic of subject matter experts, our pivotal to this is our sector expertise.
Our win with the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford was built on our deep knowledge of the healthcare sector, and our strong retail offer started with security for just one supermarket. We've now expanded to cover 4 major brands. We cover 14 sectors, and I invite you to look at those in a bit more detail in the Mitiverse that Phil showed you on one of our interactive screens in the transformation hub a bit later on. Once we've won our new customer, our shift focus to nurturing and deepening relationships with them. If we look at our top 10 strategic accounts, we've seen that account revenue grow by a 15% CAGR, against a market growth of around 5%. In other words, we've been growing well above market rate.
These top 10 accounts represent over GBP 1.3 billion of our annual revenue. We've delivered it in three ways. We've been expanding our core service. This means that we're perhaps adding new customer sites, like new offices or warehouses, to an existing cleaning contract. We're then adding brand-new service lines, cross-selling, for example, adding security to an existing cleaning contract or engineering maintenance. And then finally, we're identifying projects that the customer could invest in. This can be things like upgrading building assets, designing and fitting new workplaces, or moving to renewable energy. Now, here is a very good example of what we mean by cross-selling, and it's from one of our largest customers, a national food retailer and convenience store operator.
Over the last 10 years, we've introduced various services, which has meant we've grown the account from a GBP 15.5 million cleaning contract in 2012 to just under GBP 42 million in 2022. Over that time, we've expanded our cleaning footprint into new locations. We've added new service lines like security and winter services, and we've added capital projects work, like installing systems. In 2023, we helped them make a cost saving of GBP 2 million, and while that did impact account revenue, we've deployed smart technology, and our margins have held up. Now, our client is reinvesting in new services, with further pipeline opportunities in discussion, and you can see these on the right-hand side of the slide. Our customer is embracing decarbonization projects.
They're using AI in their fight against retail time, retail crime, and with more to come, we forecast this account to hit GBP 47 million next year. So this is a really good example of what we mean by cross-selling and upselling. Finally, we come to the keep element. We have high retention rates of around 90%. Relationships have played a really key part, and this is illustrated in our net promoter score, which has gone through a transformational change from -27 in 2018 to now +42. We've grown the number of accounts that are strategically managed from 39 to 95. These accounts have dedicated relationship managers who act as trusted advisors to our high-value clients. But we also retain our customers because of the high standards we have.
Standards like ISO 44001, which is around collaborative working with our clients, or our continuous improvement program through Six Sigma, where we're looking to create lean processes and efficiencies, and of course, our ESG policies, policies. ESG is an area we have seen rising in prominence in supplier selection, and this is especially the case with public sector customers, with some now attaching almost the same weighting as price in some examples, and as Phil outlined, we are leading in this space. So all of these, combined with how we're able to offer value through our cost to serve advantages, means customers love working with us and want to stay. So I've shown you what helps in finding, winning, growing, and keeping our customers.
Most of all, what I'd like to do now, though, is demonstrate how we're meeting customer needs, because that's at the heart of everything that we do. One of the things we really pride ourselves on is our insights and our research. We do a huge amount of research with our customers, and we make sure we speak to every customer. That's our primary level research. On a secondary level, we look at everything from social media mining to academic journals and market reports. And what this has given us is key insight into the areas that our clients need us most, and these are embraced within the five customer needs you heard about earlier. You can see some of the verbatim and data here. 65% of employees want flexible approach to their working environment. 40% of Mitie customers are investing in smart buildings.
52% of Mitie customers are looking for efficiencies. And all of this, you'll be pleased to hear, is in the thought leadership report that was on your chair when you came in earlier, so happy reading. From the insight work, we've developed the five customer needs states, which Phil outlined, and these have become a golden thread throughout our business. And below are some examples of how we've offered solutions to our customers and through our campaign work to raise awareness of what we do and how we do it. Each of the customer needs has a defined strategy with an outcome-based proposition. And to highlight just a few, our value proposition for clients wanting to transform their workspaces is called Smart Work, Smart Workplaces by Mitie, where Mitie delivers intelligent and inspiring spaces for people to connect, collaborate, and grow.
Our security offer is all about keeping our clients a step ahead by intelligently protecting them from the threats they face. And finally, our net zero offer, Decarbonisation Delivered, helping clients with their most pressing challenge, that gap between their ambition on net zero and their achievement of it. Again, you can see the breadth of the assets we have to support customer conversations. And here are some specific solutions to show you the importance of identifying those needs. You're going to see these solutions demonstrated in our transformation hub during the coffee break, so I'll just pick a few now and invite you to explore for yourself later. For the first one, you can see one of our Connected Engineer solutions. This is a virtual reality headset, and it gives access, gives our engineers access to critical information like technical drawings.
It also connects them back to our Technical Operations Centre in Manchester. It means that they're more likely to be able to complete their jobs right first time, make sure our clients' assets are maintained with minimal downtime. On the subject of asset optimization, we process 7.3 million data points every day at our Technical Operations centre. We're monitoring everything from building occupancy to heating systems, and even the weather. That's 84 data points per second. For creating healthier and more sustainable spaces, this is a robotic cleaner. You'll see it in the middle of the slide at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. These machines use advanced algorithms to optimize cleaning routes. They give maximum coverage, reduced repetition, but importantly, they free up our human teams to work on urgent or difficult cleaning requests.
It's worth mentioning that Mitie cleans over 160 million square meters of hospital space in the U.K. every year, an area roughly the size of Yellowstone National Park in the U.S. In protecting people, property, and assets, here is a team member from our Intelligence and Security Centre in Northampton. He's gathering information to help our clients keep informed on the latest security threats, and this is now hugely important to our customers in the retail space, who are facing unprecedented rises in theft and violence. Jason Towse, our MD for business services, will share more on that technology in just a moment. Finally, in the foreground of the picture on the far right, this is a car park solar panel canopy we installed at Portsmouth International Port.
This example of accelerating our clients' path to net zero has saved them over 204 tons of carbon, plus it won us Project of the Year at Construction News Awards. They've just booked some further work with us, which Mark Caskey, our MD for projects, will tell you more about. But it's a really great example of a client who's serious about reducing their carbon emissions and their costs. As you can see, our solutions go right to the heart of the customer needs, and it's this alignment which helps us cross-sell effectively, grow our account revenue, and retain our customers. So let me wrap up by coming back to our sales wheel. All of this I've just demonstrated is driving these very strong numbers. We're number one for brand awareness and consideration.
We're winning 61% of new and existing new business with our clients, and we're growing our accounts at a rate of around 15% a year, well above market. Our customers love us, 90% retention. With that, I will hand over to Cijo Joseph, our Chief Technology and Information Officer, who will now show you a little bit more of our technology. Thank you.
Thank you, Maria. Good afternoon. Phil introduced Facilities Transformation and how technology is enabling Facilities Transformation for our business units and sectors. You also heard from Maria about the customer needs and technology driving the fulfillment of those needs. I'm Cijo Joseph, Chief Technology and Information Officer at Mitie. I have been in Mitie for the last six years, and what technology teams achieved during this period is incredible and enabled Mitie to lead in Facilities Transformation. I will now take you through how we invested in building a technology platform, a unique digital platform, driving our business forward in growth and capabilities in the coming years. We, we view technology through two lenses: operational excellence and value creation.
Operational excellence is around how we improve our productivity through workforce management systems, how we drive efficiencies through the workflow management systems, and by connecting the systems which enable straight-through processing, reducing our cost to serve. In our value creation lens, we deployed digital apps technology, improving our customer experience and our colleague experience. Through our cloud-enabled data lake and applying AI on our vast data, we create value for our customers through intelligent insights, and we are bringing technologies which differentiate us in the market. Over the last six years, we have invested GBP 145 million in technology for operational excellence and the value creation, leading in Facilities Transformation. Through these investments, we created the Mitie Digital Platform.... let me take you through what we have done on operational excellence. I call this as the foundation layer of the Mitie Digital Platform, where our core applications are built.
Starting in 2018, we put an API gateway connecting our core systems. APIs, or application programming interfaces, allow different software programs to talk to each other and share data or functionality. We also created a cloud data lake to scoop and stream all our data, structured and unstructured, in near real time. We invested in hardening our cybersecurity and achieved Cyber Essentials Plus by 2019. This is an important point. We have Cyber Essentials Plus for the entirety of Mitie, not just entities supporting defense or government contracts. By 2020, we moved all our core applications into cloud. This immensely had enabled us to move, consolidate, and data migrate the 300+ applications we inherited from Interserve FM to Mitie, within a record time of 9 months. From 2018 to 2022, we have migrated away from multitudes of finance systems.
We now have only one core SAP finance system. We are investing in developing the My Mitie Colleagues app, which brings all the operational capabilities at the fingertips of our colleagues through ServiceNow technology. These capabilities range from looking at their work schedules to booking themselves into a job, or even interrogate their payslips in detail. Now, if we look at the value creation, way back in 2018, we created Esme, the AI-enabled FM chatbot assistant. We have done this in collaboration with one of our big banking customers. This year, Esme got integrated with Azure's ChatGPT, which makes it powered with multiple NLU, Natural Language Understanding AI engines. With this, Esme has now around 97% success in understanding and accurately raising an issue. We launched Merlin in 2019, an intelligent security management system, now enhanced with demand-led cleaning functionalities.
Merlin is now deployed into over 22,000 locations, supporting security and cleaning. We launched Mosaic in 2020, our unique data visualization tool built on top of our cloud data lake. 153 customers are now using Mosaic for their operational and contractual insights, and the numbers are growing with more and more customers getting onboarded onto Mosaic. Aria is a groundbreaking workplace PropTech app with our AI-enabled Esme as its brain. We launched Aria in 2021, and 34 customers with around 11,000 users are now using this app to raise their issues, to get updates on their issues, for booking spaces, booking meeting rooms, and even to order coffee. With more and more customers are adopting this simple-to-use mobile app.
In 2022, we launched Forte, focusing on transforming customer service delivery, process, technology, and people in our technical services business unit. This brought an ecosystem of technologies supporting technical services. Simon will cover more in his presentation. We are now investing in smart cameras and intelligent automation in our security business. Underpinning all this is our cyber investment, creating layers of protection around these technologies and capabilities. The external cyber ratings consistently rate us as exceptional. While we were implementing it, we were also recognized by the prestigious UK IT Industry Awards throughout the years, whether it is for our AI or for our big data, and we've won this against some of the largest blue-chip companies.
Over the last four years, as Phil and Maria mentioned, listening to the customer needs and to our colleagues and investing in the right technologies led us to create this unique Mitie Digital Platform, which is at the heart of our business and our facilities transformation. You saw Phil introducing MitieVerse, and the Mitie Digital Platform is at the core of MitieVerse. The platform is built on Mitie's technology foundation layer and the data ecosystem layer, enabling connected intelligent building capabilities. Let me take you through these layers. The Mitie technology foundation layer is where all the core technology platforms come together. In the previous slide on operational excellence and value creation, I called out the key technologies building this foundation layer. Every technology we put in this layer is interconnected through API integration for a smooth data flow between systems supporting the business processes.
We linked up the IoT, the sensors, the BMS, building management systems through this layer. We also built digital apps for our customers to create the customer experience. As you heard from Phil, we did this with our strategic technology partners, who continuously innovate and invest in these platforms. We then stream the data from all these systems and technologies into our unique data ecosystem. Our data ecosystem layer is built and run on the best-in-breed technologies, creating our data lake cloud. For us, the data lake brings all the data across Mitie platforms and aggregates into one place. To give us a full end-to-end picture and insights, and this happens in near real time.
Not only does it bring all the enterprise data of IT, information technologies, but it also streams in the equipment, the plants, the assets data, which is the OT, operational technologies, through the IoT, BMS, and sensors, creating the convergence of IT and OT technologies very successfully. This is where the uniqueness is, a single data environment across business. We hold 772 terabytes of digital data, which is three-fourths of a petabyte. The data has grown 14-15 times in the last four years. Three-fourths of a—it's a large data, huge data, big data. Just as a comparison, a petabyte is the equivalent of 20 million tall filing cabinets. I don't think, as per my knowledge, any of the FM firms had done this convergence of data as we did in Mitie.
We then apply data science and machine learning algorithms on this complete aggregated data set to drive rich insights for our customers and colleagues. We present this data in a simple dashboard through the Mosaic application we developed for our customers and colleagues. Combining the technology foundation layer and the data ecosystem provides a rich set of capabilities. The capabilities include carbon reporting, digital maintenance of assets, security and intelligent capabilities, predictive and preventive maintenance capabilities, space planning and optimization, and digital twin for our Projects business, creating the rich, connected, intelligent buildings capability. This forms our Mitie Digital Platform, secured by cyber protection tools and techniques. The platform creates an ecosystem of connected technologies, and capabilities are fully available for our various operations center. TSOC is our Technical Services Operations Centre based in Manchester, where our experts monitor workflows and workforces in real time.
Dynamic work allocations, remote monitoring and fixing happens from there. Simon will touch upon this. ISOC is our Intelligence Security Operations Centre based in Northampton. Security alerts and CCTV monitoring are done through there. Jason will cover this in his presentation. CHCoE is our Cleaning and Hygiene Centre of Excellence based in Birmingham. Alice will speak about it more. And PCoE is our Projects Centre of Excellence, which Mark Caskey will touch upon. Our experts in Mitie Operations utilize these capabilities I mentioned to serve our customers. We also extended these capabilities through digital apps for our customers to self-serve, whether through the Mosaic or Aria app. Our colleagues are equipped with these apps to leverage Mitie Digital Platform capabilities for their own needs and to look after our customer needs.
Aligned with our Science of Service pillars, which you heard from Maria, we continuously adopt emerging technologies into our Mitie Digital Platform, creating early value for our customers. Through digital maintenance, we are optimizing, we are optimizing asset performance and maximizing productivity. 20 million data points are analyzed every week, with around 95% of BMS incidents managed remotely where we have digital maintenance. I spoke about Aria Esme and how it enhances workplace and customer experience. What it used to take anywhere between 20 minutes to 6 minutes on the phone to raise a request, it now takes under 42 seconds with Aria Esme AI engine. Robotic cleaning are delivering 35%-52% reduction in carpet pathogens where deployed, creating healthier and sustainable spaces. Merlin security patrol is used increasingly to protect people, asset, and environments.
Our carbon and energy reporting are helping our customers accelerate their path to net zero. In summary, through our unique Mitie Digital Platform, which is at the core of our MitieVerse, we are leading facilities transformations. Over the next few hours, you will hear from Simon, Jason, Alice, and Mark on the business benefits of technology, ranging from everything through AI-led predictive maintenance or remote fixing of the issues in engineering, through carbon reporting and pathway to net zero in our Projects capability, to AI-led analytics, to intelligent security through Merlin Security Protect in security, to AI-led, demand-led cleaning. You will see all these key technologies in action during the technology break. This is what we call facilities transformation through Mitie Digital Platforms. Thank you. We have a short break now.
We got tea, we got tea break in 15 minutes, so, back at 2:15, if that's okay. Stop recording. Thank you.
... Okay, we're going to get started if we may.
Okay, welcome back. The focus of this session is to explore the investments that give Mitie leading service line capability across cleaning, security, engineering services, and projects. We'll start with the focus on cleaning. My name's Alice Woodwark. I am the Managing Director of Mitie Communities. Communities is the Mitie division that looks after hospitals, schools, emergency services, custody environments. I joined Mitie in 2021. Before that, I worked for Compass Group, initially as the Group Head of Strategy and M&A, and then as a Managing Director in Compass's UK business. I am delighted to talk with you today about Mitie's expertise in cleaning and hygiene, and how this delivers business value, as I see this value every day through the clients that I serve in Mitie Communities and also across the wider Mitie business. Mitie is the country's largest specialist cleaning provider.
We have over 22,000 cleaning technicians that work across the U.K. in offices, hospitals, defense sites, on manufacturing floors, and also right across the U.K.'s transport system. Our standards are officially fit for a king, as our colleagues also form part of the Royal Households at both Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace. What I'm going to share with you here is what drives both our success and our future ambitions in cleaning and hygiene. Today, what we'll demonstrate to you is the power of our business model, combining expertise and scale in a way that's unique to Mitie. Firstly, we invest in original research and development. Secondly, we use leading-edge technology to drive efficiency and productivity for our clients. Thirdly, we deliver demand-led services that meet not just our clients' cleaning needs, but their wider business needs.
Delivering against these three core value drivers means that we win in key areas of facilities transformation, particularly, in areas to do with productivity, the creation of healthier and more hygienic spaces, and also accelerating the path towards Net Zero. Only the leading player in the market with a standout commitment to facilities transformation can achieve this. So before we go into our cleaning and hygiene business model, I want first to reinforce the immense scale and great opportunity in the UK cleaning market. The market for cleaning and hygiene services is worth almost GBP 8 billion and is growing at over 3% a year. Mitie is the largest player, with a market share of 9%.... Cleaning and hygiene is one of our core capabilities across Mitie Group.
It's a significant part of what we deliver to customers across business services, central government and defense, and Mitie Communities. In my division, Mitie Communities, cleaning and hygiene is our largest service line, and the spaces that we keep clean include oncology wards, laboratories in universities, custody suites, and children's operating theaters. These are all places where our expertise in cleaning and hygiene has a value far beyond its cost, and you'll see today how we deliver that value through the smart application of technology and insight. Looking at market growth drivers, value in this market is increasingly driven by those who invest in a more intelligent solution. At the top of our list of growth drivers, we see opportunities to work with our clients to attract more workers back to the office, to support our clients' social goals, and to achieve their net zero ambitions.
Then on the supply side, growth is driven by advances in technology such as robotics and sensors, as well as harnessing big data and analytics to fundamentally shift the productivity of our cleaning technicians. This delivers measurably better cleaning at lower cost. Turning to the first of Mitie's three core value drivers in cleaning and hygiene. At Mitie, we now build our own intellectual property in the cleaning, creating sources of value that set us apart from our competition. The table here shows the diverse and often high-margin market segments in which Mitie has a strong position. These include clean room capabilities, for example, for our pharmaceutical clients, intelligent software solutions, and also biohazard and disaster response. Our competitive success is underpinned by investment in original research and development.
At our Cleaning and Hygiene Centre of Excellence in Birmingham, which is, pictured here, we test the efficacy of cleaning products. We quantify productivity gains, for example, through the use of robotics, and we also develop user cases for deployment of technologies such as artificial intelligence in cleaning solutions of the future. Later in the day, we'll bring the Cleaning and Hygiene Centre of Excellence to you through our transformation hub showcase. Our Centre of Excellence also plays a critical role bringing us together with our clients. Just last month, I invited 15 of our NHS clients to experience the Centre of Excellence for themselves. Being there with clinical and infection control clients just generated a deeper level of conversation about innovation, and this has sown the seeds for future collaborations, which are going to benefit both the NHS and Mitie.
The second of our core value drivers in cleaning is our ability to drive new efficiency and productivity gains from the application of technology. Merlin Connect is a great example of this, and to introduce this transformative technology, I'd like to share a short video.
Do you want the most effective cleaning team you'll ever have? You need Merlin Connect. It's cleaning delivered with intelligence, driving operational excellence and enhancing compliance. Merlin Connect gives you total visibility, using data and intelligence to maximize productivity. Empowering frontline heroes with clarity and evidence of their amazing outputs. But what does that really mean? It means a single home for all your data sources, integrating with powerful technologies, including AI and robotics. It means analysts using data-driven insight to enhance your service, empowering you to reduce costs, improve productivity, and operate more efficiently, enhancing experiences for people, driving sustainability to protect the planet, and saving money for your organization. It's true demand-led cleaning. It's the most effective cleaning team you'll ever have. It's cleaning delivered with intelligence. It's Merlin Connect.
Merlin Connect is unique to Mitie, and it was developed by us. It delivers value in two ways. So firstly, on the left, Merlin Connect significantly enhances the quality of the cleaning that we provide, and it allows our clients to verify this quality through proof of presence, through paperless audits, and also through a real-time client dashboard. Secondly, on the right, Merlin Connect enhances the cleaning efficiency that we deliver by up to 10%. The data that Merlin generates is analyzed to match service and demand, to eliminate downtime, and also to benchmark our teams. Beyond all of this, Merlin Connect also increases employee engagement and therefore our employee retention.
Last month, I met our cleaning technicians using Merlin Connect at Birmingham New Street Station, and they showed me and told me how Merlin is making their work more rewarding and engaging because they know they're cleaning what needs to be cleaned. The third of our core value drivers in cleaning is our delivery of demand-led services that meet not just our clients' cleaning needs, but also their wider business needs, and this is shown best in a real client case study. This Mitie client is an international e-commerce provider, for whom we deliver cleaning, washroom services, and also waste management. We support 54 of their sites across the UK, with 1,200 cleaning technicians. We invest in understanding this client's needs, including their focus on staff retention on their side, their drive to reduce their costs, and also their need for enormous operational flexibility....
Our service solution meets all of those needs. We have a dedicated delivery model that provides management, quality, and health and safety expertise. Our employee engagement program is tailored to this client's very 24/7 operating environment. For example, our excellently named Nightclub program trains and supports our colleagues whatever time of day or night their shift. At this client, Merlin Connect has been deployed, and here it's identified productivity, savings, or productivity gains of 10%+. We're analyzing the data from Merlin to provide peak demand planning for our client's extreme seasonal peaks and troughs. The outcomes are impressive and have rewarded Mitie with greater value from this contract. Our staff attrition at 10% is industry-leading, and a Net Promoter Score of 100 is unbeatable.
We've grown this contract by 50% a year, now to a revenue of GBP 34 million, and we've traded on our success, cross-selling additional services to our clients, including engineering and projects, most recently, a very significant solar installation. So here we summarize how Mitie's approach in cleaning and hygiene gives us a winning competitive advantage. Our wins come from investment in innovation. Solutions tailored to sectors, something I know has real impact in specialist areas such as healthcare and laboratories. Investment in people and excellent delivery. A focus on delivering sustainable and hygienic environments, again, often through the application of technology. And the use of data and insights to enhance our competitiveness on both price and quality. Bringing all of this together, our strength in cleaning and hygiene is based on a very clear strategy, which will continue to power our success.
We'll continue to lead on research and development, particularly through our Centre of Excellence and through software solutions. We will expand our work with leading-edge technology to become even more efficient and even more productive. We will partner with more current and prospective clients to deliver more demand-led services that meet our clients' whole business needs. As the leading player in the market, with a market share of 9%, we still have enormous headroom to grow, backed by our technology-led approach. Thank you. I'm now going to hand over to Jason Towse, to explore Mitie's exceptional security capabilities.
Thank you, Alice. I'm sure you'll agree, hasn't cleaning come a long way in the last few years? I'm Jason Towse, I'm the Managing Director of Business Services. I've been at Mitie for around 11 years. Prior to that, I spent 20 years in security, specializing in risk management of retail and aviation security. Unsurprisingly, I'm going to talk to you about Mitie's security capability and its growth potential. The security business that I lead specializes in security and delivers services to all Mitie divisions. Examples of these include to military environments in our central government and defense sector, division rather, accident and emergency department security for healthcare and communities. For business services, we provide protective services to the world's largest and the U.K.'s most secure nuclear storage facility.
Mitie is the U.K.'s largest award-winning security business, and today, I'll explain how we continue to transform security, and why we are the U.K.'s leading integrator and converged security services provider. How we leverage technology to maintain and build on our competitive advantage, and how we draw on our expertise to exceed customers' needs and develop, and develop intelligent, transformational solutions through a sectorial approach. Aligned with our strategy that combines intelligence, technology, and people, our primary focus is in protecting people, property, and assets. Turning to the U.K. security market. Mitie is the number one security provider. In 2022, the addressable market stood at around GBP 7.6 billion, with an expected compounded average growth rate of 5% by 2027.
Mitie's 12% share is predominantly in the private sector, and as you will see from the chart on the bottom left-hand side of this slide, only 3% of Mitie's security revenue comes from our central government defense and communities division, meaning there is significant opportunity for growth. Moving across to some of our growth drivers. Customers are today demanding a more rounded and holistic set of security products and services, driven by the evolving threat landscape and focused on national security and counter-terrorism, as well as the need to protect critical assets. You will have all heard and read about the increasing level of business crime, driven by burglary, violence, antisocial behavior, and theft, and this is particularly prominent in retail and shopping centers. In a moment, I'll talk to you about what we are doing with our retail clients in response to this trend.
The third growth driver is the development of complex, remotely managed, integrated security management systems, otherwise known as ISMS, and the increasing need for data analytics, automation, and AI-powered systems. This will be front and center in future proof and security programs, and is an area where we are well-positioned, thanks to our own Mitie Verse and the power it gives us to integrate systems. The last of these growth drivers are the changes in legislation. These are the forthcoming changes with the Protect Duty that calls for additional protection levels for publicly accessible locations, and post-Grenfell, the new Fire and Safety Act and Building Safety Act of 2022 that are referenced in the Hackitt Report. This is where Mitie, we are a step ahead, leading transformation across the whole security sector. Let's take a look at what we are doing compared to our peers.
We developed a broad range of self-delivery capabilities illustrated in this matrix. These capabilities provide solutions for today's challenges, and more importantly, they position Mitie as a leader when it comes to transforming traditional security into forward-thinking solutions. We have invested into a broad range of technology and intelligence capabilities that typically deliver higher margins, and these feature around five key areas. The recent acquisition of R H Irving, a business specializing in the design and installation of high-tech perimeter security systems, has given us the opportunity to adapt to deliver complex solutions as customers' threats and risk profiles evolve. This acquisition has also added new capabilities to Mitie's existing fire and security business, and will play an important role in delivering more sophisticated, integrated security management systems and services.
And the risk and assurance and proactive intelligence services provided by Mitie delivers data and insights to customers, putting them in a position where they can make immediate interventions when considering their own risk management. This is an exciting space for us at Mitie, and through the addition of Esoteric in 2021, Mitie are now world leaders in total security countermeasures, and these include counterespionage, hostile surveillance, and eavesdropping detection. And finally, to the right of this matrix, our investments in dedicated security operations centers mean that we can drive consistency in operation standards and technology platforms, including data collection tools that ultimately provide real-time, actionable intelligence. In security, seeing is believing. So let's take a brief look into the practical world of our security business.
Security has changed. It has always needed intelligence, technology, and people, but now it needs more. To adapt to evolving threats, security needs to be holistic. With crime, activism, and antisocial behavior all rising, security has to change. It needs intelligent protection. It needs to be a step ahead. With real-time intelligence, market-leading technology, and expertly trained personnel, Mitie keeps your security fully in tune with the evolving landscape, identifying and assessing threats and risks, and implementing the best methods to manage and mitigate them. Evaluating insider threat and espionage, integrating technology to meet specific risk-based requirements. It's security driven by intelligence data, powered by cutting-edge technology, and made exceptional by expert people.
With a network of dedicated customer security operation centers and intelligence professionals, bolstering your security with artificial intelligence, integrated security management systems, and enhanced perimeter protection, with frontline heroes providing assurance in an ever-changing world of threats and risks. It's intelligence and technology, empowering people to secure your environments. It's connected security, delivering intelligent protection. It's Mitie Security, keeping you a step ahead.
But what does this really mean for our customers? Earlier, you heard Phil talk about facilities transformation and putting our customers' needs first, and otherwise, protecting people, property, and assets today and developing tomorrow's solutions. With technology now an integral part of any security strategy, system integration, interoperability, and the smart use of data analytics and connected IP enablers are all key in delivering customer outcomes, such as responding as the first line of defense, converging physical protection, and remote service capability. Delivering connected security solutions is the key and works best when human expertise is combined with technology, allowing the strengths to work together. Supporting the 22,000 locations nationwide, our world-class intelligence security operations center and its analysts have access to real-time video analytics and live incident data powered by Mitie's 24/7 Protect platform.
The Workplace Plus online workforce management system provides us the visibility of where our 20,000 people are every minute of the day. Connected security also includes a greater use of biometric technologies, intelligent AI tools and AI-based video analytics, as these are rapidly becoming mainstream. You will find some examples of these on display in our innovation hub shortly. This case study demonstrates how we deliver a connected security solution to a major national retailer. Our objectives are to mitigate over 30% rise in theft and violence, to help mitigate rising costs due to inflation that last year stood over 10%, and to reduce rising shrinkage levels, at the same time as enhancing the consumer's experience.
Mitie's answer to this has been to provide a fully connected security model to manage the 1,500 locations nationwide across the whole estate through a blend of intelligence, technology, and people. At the heart of this solution is a bespoke, market-leading security operations center that combines live incident management, CCTV monitoring, and an end-to-end crime management through a dedicated crime intelligence team. Through the channels I've just described, our team, our team monitor, collate, and analyze multiple data sources so that we can deploy mobile and in-store response teams to tackle shoplifters. This includes a team of 2,700 security officers and 200 covert store detectives, deployed to keep customers and consumers safe and target high-loss areas. The outcomes of this service is quite compelling.
For every 1 GBP the customer spends with us on this contract, we stop 0.48 GBP from leaving the store in terms of goods. Over the past 12 months, our teams have actively recorded 1.2 million security incidents and recovered GBP 48 million worth of stock, while making 37,000 citizens arrests, and has resulted in over 3,700 weeks of custodial sentences. Success with this customer in the retail sector has been the key part in the role Mitie have played in the launch of Pegasus. Pegasus forms part of Opal, a new and specialist police unit funded by retailers. This will focus on prolific offenders and organized crime groups.
With the full support of Chris Philp, the Minister for Crime and Policing, Mitie have been instrumental in seeking Home Office support for Pegasus, a board made up of police chiefs, police and crime commissioners, and major retailers. An important point is Mitie is the only private security business that will play an active role in this initiative, that is set to be officially launched at Ten Downing Street later this month. Focusing on why we win, we are genuinely excited about the future of security and the part we'll play. With an unrivaled scale and range of capabilities, we will win large transformational contracts. Our technologies create better experiences for our people and our customers whilst on their digital journeys.
Leading in the latest technology, we have one of the best physical security solutions, and combined with data and emerging AI tools, we will identify efficiencies that design targeted, bespoke security solutions. Leveraging our deep, deep expertise, the ability to reference key sectors, we continue to develop and diversify our service offering to suit the changing needs of our customers. Through the ability to attract and retain industry's most talented people from backgrounds such as military, intelligence, and law enforcement, we will deliver an intelligence services that will highlight emerging threats to protect people, property, and assets. In summary, I hope I've clearly demonstrated how we are a step ahead in transforming security through our intelligent and converged approach. The security industry is facing huge digital disruption, and change in this area is certain.
Our success is down to how we continue to embrace this transformation. As industry leaders and sector experts, we will challenge conventional thinking and focus on how converging physical security and technologies will provide the next level of insights for our customers, create value, and maintain our competitive advantage. At Mitie, we stay a step ahead in transforming security through intelligence, technology, and above all, our people. Thank you. Please welcome Simon Venn, who'll provide a deep insight into engineering services.
Thanks, Jason. So, good afternoon, everybody. My name is Simon Venn. I'm the Managing Director of our Technical Services division. Prior to Mitie, I worked for large companies like Royal Dutch Shell and Cable & Wireless before founding my own specialist project management business, Source8, which I actually sold to Mitie back in 2014. So I've been with the company now for nearly 14... No, 10 years, sorry. 2014, 10 years. Good with numbers. And I've been running the Technical Services division for nearly 2 of those now. But I'm not here to talk about technical services today. I'm actually going to be talking to you about our engineering capability across the entire business, so including central government and defense, communities, and business services.
If you take away just three things from my presentation, then number one, we have the broadest set of engineering capabilities in the market. Number two, as you heard from Cijo, we have the most advanced technology platform, which improves productivity and reduces our cost to serve. And number three, if you take one and two combined, this enables us to both cross-sell and upsell high-value services, which in turn increases our margins and accelerates organic growth across our key accounts. So let's just reflect on the market in which we operate. Engineering services accounts for a third of the total U.K. FM market, and as Phil said earlier, it is growing faster than the market at 3.9%. Mitie's got a 21% share of this, with our nearest competitor occupying circa half of that share.
The point of note, our engineering business has more than doubled since our last capital markets day back in 2019. We are in a commanding position. If we look at the growth drivers, FM trends have evolved over time in response to changing economic, societal, and technological landscapes, but this has only served to amplify the crucial role that facilities play in supporting business operations. Perhaps the single largest growth driver for the sector, not just engineering, is decarbonization. If you look outside, even in this misty weather, at all of the buildings, as far as your eye will carry you, 83% of those commercial buildings, the length and breadth of this country, do not meet the minimum energy efficiency standards required by 2030. That's just seven years away, 83%. Consequently, there will be a requirement to upgrade and renovate these buildings.
This won't just create a renovation wave, this will create a renovation tidal wave. It's not just driven by government policy, investors, and more importantly, employees are demanding it, with sustainability, health, and well-being high on their agendas. So it's no longer a choice. Companies must transform their portfolios to meet the standards required, as well as employee demands for flexibility, fewer, better workspaces that are really worth the commute. Technology is no longer a nice-to-have, it's a must-have. 5G technology, in particular, will not only be the catalyst for growth for the UK digital economy, it will fundamentally change the way we use, manage, and maintain our infrastructure. Lastly, meeting these challenges head-on is essential for organizations to win the war on talent. Workspaces are the beacon of a company's culture, and they play an increasingly important role in attraction and retention.
In summary, the market is changing, and our customers' needs are changing, but we have the specific capabilities required to address their needs and lead this change. You can see from the data produced by Frost & Sullivan, that our scale and advanced technology provides us with a competitive advantage over our peers, because it enables us to deliver a broader range of core engineering services. We also have the biggest national static and mobile engineering workforce by far, with 8,000 Mitie engineers, 350 of which are based on the Falkland Islands, keeping the U.K. military's mission-critical systems up and running. We also have the full spectrum of our capabilities being self-delivered. If you see a Mitie engineer in a hospital or in the station as you leave here today, then it's someone employed by Mitie.
Perhaps the key point on this slide, though, is not only do we have the broadest set of capabilities, but a number of these are predicated on the world-class technology platform we have, which enables us to deliver advanced digital maintenance services like remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and asset lifetime data analysis. These unique capabilities enable us to transform and optimize our customers' estates. We're not resting on our laurels either. We are extending our capabilities beyond the traditional energy engineering services I've just outlined, into higher value disciplines to address our customers' increasingly complex needs. These are new, exciting, fast growth, high-margin markets, which are linked to the growth drivers I just outlined earlier: decarbonization, technology, and the evolving workplace. We are uniquely placed within our sector to address our customers' needs across all of these areas.
For example, we have the full spectrum of engineering capabilities required to decarbonize our customers' estates, or to secure their energy through independent off-grid solutions like microgrids or distributed energy networks, all of which we then maintain. From a technology perspective, we are actively delivering and maintaining the UK's 5G telecommunications infrastructure, critical national infrastructure, and we have the network engineers and the data center specialists required to maintain these mission-critical assets. From a workplace perspective, we have the designers, architects, and consultants to build the workplaces of the future, with cutting-edge mechanical and electrical technologies that you can see here in The Shard, which also kill airborne pathogens, creating secure, healthy workplaces. This takes us beyond traditional engineering into the provision of higher-value engineering services, which will also generate new project revenue streams. If we're going to maintain it, we'd rather like to build it.
Mark Caskey will be talking next about our unrivaled projects capability in more depth, because it really is going to be a powerful engine for growth. This is all underpinned by a world-class, cloud-based technology platform with individual solutions that add significant value for our customers. Technology has become an integral part of facility management, enabling greater efficiency, lower cost, and improved decision-making for our customers. I mentioned earlier that a number of our unique capabilities and services are predicated on the technology platform that we have. For example, connected engineering, digital maintenance, and real-time data analytics tools like Mosaic, which enable us to predictively and proactively manage and optimize our customers' estates. One thing that we can all be certain of is that AI will become mainstream....
The digital and the physical worlds will converge with digital twins and building information modeling becoming the norm rather than the exception, and the metaverse will continue to evolve. This, in turn, will lead to the emergence of new customer needs. We're having conversations now that we wouldn't have been having five years ago, or even three. For example, using AI and machine learning to provide our customers with predictive analysis regarding the condition of their assets, so that maintenance regimes can be tailored in real time to reduce risk and optimize performance across their estates, or the requirement for complex energy management solutions, as well as completely new opportunities, new services with exciting new commercial models. For example, software as a service, where we take our platform and provide it to customers as a standalone supplier-agnostic solution.
What is clear is that the integration of technology into facilities has transformed traditional reactive engineering practices into smart, proactive, data-driven digital solutions. Workforce and workflow management are critical components of this. And while Forte took longer to implement than we would have liked, because we had to clean all of our data, all 20 million cabinets worth that Cijo referred to earlier, it's now up and running, and it's delivering significant value for both our organization and our customers. And having cleaned our data, we now have an infinitely scalable technology platform, where AI and machine learning can be fully leveraged to deliver genuinely innovative digital solutions and services that our competitors simply cannot match. To that end, here's a quick video that demonstrates just how much these investments have transformed the way we now deliver engineering services here at Mitie.
The video exemplifies what we mean when we talk about the Science of Service and moving from facility management to facility transformation. It's the combination of all of these things that also increases the barriers to entry for our competitors and provides us with competitive advantage, a competitive edge. It's why we win. We have unrivaled scale and capability, a deep sector focus and understanding of the customers we serve, allied to specialist capabilities to help our customers overcome the biggest challenges they face with regard to decarbonization or transforming their estates, which is all underpinned by advanced technology and delivered, most importantly, by our exceptional people. To put this into context, if we look at one of our top ten customers, Vodafone, we provide so much more than traditional IFM services.
We provide the full spectrum of our service capability, including smart, proactive, next-gen digital engineering services with our TSOC in Manchester, monitoring connected assets across their retail estate, with 97% of faults now being resolved remotely. We're helping transform their office spaces and their technical infrastructure so that it is fit for the future. This includes decarbonizing their estate and securing their energy through off-grid solutions. 90% of a telecommunication company's energy is typically generated by its technical estate. UK telcos all saw their energy bills increase in the wake of the Ukraine war, with increases of circa GBP 50 million per annum, not uncommon. This is why the narrative quickly changed from one of climate change to one of energy security.
Beyond all of this, we are directly supporting their core business by rolling out and maintaining their critical mobile network infrastructure, where we do everything from acquiring sites to designing and building the mobile mast infrastructure that we then maintain. You can see from the outcomes, this translates into significant bottom line savings that run into the tens of GBP millions, whilst also markedly improving the performance and resilience of their core business. This is what we mean by facilities transformation. In summary, transformation is at the heart of everything we do. The industry is changing, and our customers' needs are changing and becoming increasingly complex. We have both the scale and the unrivaled engineering capabilities required to lead that change. Where you have change, you also have opportunity, and the opportunity to cross-sell and upsell higher value services has never been greater.
To that end, I'm delighted now to hand you over to Mark Caskey to talk about our industry-leading project management business. Thank you.
Thank you, Simon. Well, thank you, Simon. So good afternoon. My name is Mark Caskey, and I am the Managing Director for Mitie Projects. I've been with Mitie since the start of 2023, but I've worked for over 20 years in the real estate industry, both on the corporate side as well as on the client side, and most lately as the EMEA CEO for Jones Lang LaSalle's occupier business. Within Mitie, we've managed projects for our clients across all business divisions for many years. However, one of the themes you'd have picked up today, our client needs are changing, and they're changing fast in line with the client needs states that Phil and Maria have touched on earlier in the day.
In response to this, we're now taking a group view of our projects capability, so we can accelerate the value that we can bring to our clients. We will do this by leveraging our national scale and UK market leadership position as we continue to invest in capabilities that enable us to transform our clients' real estate portfolios. So where are we today? Mitie Projects generated GBP 820 million of revenue in FY 2023, which was an increase of 18% on the prior year. We have over 2,500 employees providing project management services to over 200 of Mitie's core clients. This accounts for 78% of our revenue, where we manage capital spend in addition to our facilities management spend.
These revenues flow from having our project management teams co-located in the buildings with our FM teams, and we upsell the core elements of our project service on top of our FM deliveries models, building on the knowledge of the assets that we maintain each and every day. Our sales pipeline is currently GBP 1.8 billion and is growing as we—as investment continues to be made in decarbonization programs and building upgrades. We deliver projects across all Mitie divisions, and there is a healthy split between the public and the private sector. You can see many of the clients that we work with on the slide in front of you. You may also note the low percentage of revenue in business services.
This does not include the recent acquisition that Jason mentioned of R H Irving Industrials, and we see strong growth in fire and security projects as we look forward. We also participate on numerous government frameworks, such as PSDS, HELGA, and Lexica, and these provide a source of finance for our clients to invest in a wide range of decarbonization solutions. It is also important to note that most of the projects we deliver in the commercial building upgrade and retrofit programs and are sub GBP 1 million in value. These projects are short cycle, which gives us a better predictability of resource needs and helps with the pricing of trades and materials.
But that said, we do manage a small number of large projects each and every year, and this could be us designing and fitting out an office facility, fitting out a new manufacturing facility or a data center asset. So if we turn to our capabilities, to best support our client needs, we've invested into, and we've developed a wide range of consulting, design, and build capabilities across the group. We have 300 consulting professionals who develop energy and decarbonization strategies, workplace programs, and develop building technology solutions. These teams solve big picture challenges for our clients. For example, how do I decarbonize my real estate portfolio? How do I adapt my building to improve employee experience and adapt to changes in hybrid working patterns?
Aligned to this consulting capability, we have a team of 500 strategic asset and program managers who help our clients get the maximum value from their allocated capital budgets to transform their property assets. In addition, as you can see on the slide, we have a wide range of design and build capabilities in-house within Mitie, and as such, we have the national scale to deliver simple and complex programs within the built environment across all asset classes. The platform underpinning Mitie Projects is the Projects Centre of Excellence. You should think of this as a central enablement capability that drives innovation and productivity....
owns operational standards, manages our projects technology platform, which includes design technologies, BIM models, project management tools such as Asite that we use across the business, and building sensor technologies, which you can visualize later when you go into the transformation hub. It also acts as a knowledge center to support our 2,500 employees across the business. So our strategy within Mitie focuses on managing and optimizing the full life cycle of an asset. And in doing so, we can truly manage and optimize the total cost of ownership to our clients, which improves the value they get from its property estate. Our approach follows the consult, design, build, and maintain model, which enables us to provide a full end-to-end solution to our clients.
As touched on previously, our consultants work at the front end of a client project opportunity or to solve a business challenge and determine an optimal solution and a return on investment. We then have deep expertise in design following the RIBA stages, leveraging technology and asset scanning, experiential and detailed design, and BIM modeling. From the design phase, our project management teams then complete the project through active on-site management so that we deliver to scope and on schedule. Once built, we complete the asset lifecycle through our facility management teams, again, leveraging data and technology from the BIM models, ensuring a seamless integration with the FM asset management systems, from which operational routines can then be implemented. Over time, we continue to work with our clients to optimize their assets in the longer term, from which new consulting and project management assignments may then arise.
So looking at the addressable market for Mitie Projects, and we've estimated this to be approximately GBP 19 billion per annum. And we look at it into four key segments: building infrastructure, decarbonization technologies, telecoms infrastructure, and fire and security. We see an increasing amount of capital being deployed by our clients and investors into project works that have been driven by asset lifecycle upgrades. You heard from Simon, if you look outside, only 17% of the assets here, as you can see, are fit for 2030. Workplaces of the future to accommodate changes in hybrid working and are both captured within the building infrastructure category.
The decarbonization of real estate portfolios, noting that 40% of the world's carbon emissions come from the built environment, the continued rollout of 5G across the UK, and continued investment from a fire and security perspective in the built environment. We also see accelerated growth across numerous asset classes, such as data centers, healthcare, hospitals, e-commerce and logistics assets. The slide also depicts Mitie's revenues by each one of the categories. In total, over the last three years, our Projects business has grown at a CAGR of 16% per annum. We have seen outsized revenue growth in the segments of decarbonization, telecommunications, and fire and security, which in part is driven organically by increasing levels of demand by our clients, but also M&A that I will now move on to.
Our M&A string-of-pearl strategy has been, and continues to be, to acquire growth companies that either drive scale into our existing capabilities or add new capabilities that are all aligned with the client need states that you've heard throughout the day. As you can see from the slide, we've successfully acquired and have integrated, albeit cleaning waste, we are now starting the integration, of 13 companies that have significantly broadened our project management offering and strengthened our overall delivery capability. Whether that's in telecoms with DAEL, P2ML, 8.8. In critical engineering environments, data centers, hospitals, healthcare assets with JCA. Biotecture for wellness in buildings, R H Irving Industrials, as Jason mentioned, covering fire and security. And on the far right, Custom Solar, Rock Power Connections, and G2 Energy, who collectively have significantly enhanced our decarbonization offering.
Our integration strategy is growth-focused, and we continue to invest in these companies post-acquisition to ensure they have the resource and delivery capabilities to be able to manage the increased level of demand that comes from our Mitie client base. Looking forward, we are going to continue to scan the market for future acquisitions that fit our strategy and enables us to best support our clients in the transformation of their real estate portfolios. And this will be in the areas of telecoms, design, sustainability consulting, fire and security, as well as more opportunities around decarbonization technologies. We do operate in a competitive environment, but we see three key elements of Mitie's project business that gives us a competitive advantage, and this is why we win. This is why clients trust us, and this is why you're seeing the growth opportunity historically and into the future.
Firstly, our national size and scale as a leading principal contractor in the UK, working directly with the end user client. Secondly, the breadth and depth of our product offering across all asset classes, aligned with our consult, design, build, and maintain approach that enables us to truly manage and optimize the full asset lifecycle… on behalf of our clients' portfolios. And thirdly, the quality, the experience, the size of our consulting and professional teams, who work with our clients each and every day, turning strategy into execution. Now, I didn't come with a video today, but instead, I've got a number of case studies. So I'm gonna use the 2-3 minutes that my colleagues stole with videos, and I'll talk about some of the case studies. But these are some of the larger transformational projects that we've delivered in recent times for our clients.
What I hope you can see is, this will show in one of the earlier slides in terms of what we've, what we're able to bring to the benefit of our client base. So firstly, top left, Ministry of Defence. Now, we've worked with the MOD, UK and overseas, for many years. In the Falkland Islands in Mount Pleasant, we've recently refurbished the runway, together with building a new logistics facility, which also includes aircraft refuelling equipment for around about GBP 12 million. As we move to the right, I touch on Kao, and that's a data center. This is a long-term major customer for JCA.
Recently, JCA have designed and built a leading data center facility in Harlow, which is BREEAM Excellent-rated for a cost of over GBP 40 million, and it was built in 4 phases over an 18-month period, and works on a second data center facility have already commenced. Next, on EV, and we currently support several charge point operators with their EV hub rollouts across the UK. And for one confidential client, we've completed now over 20 ultra-rapid EV hubs within the last year and expect to complete another 40 more before next summer. With Lloyds Banking Group, post the pandemic, we've been supporting Lloyds to make their workplaces more inspirational, more attractive, flexible, collaborative, to encourage staff to come back into the office and be their best selves.
The largest workplace design and fit-out project we've done for Lloyds recently is in their Keens House property in Andover. It was around GBP 10 million program. Turning to the bottom left, this is Lakeside North Harbour, and it's the second project that Maria referred to earlier. This was a recent win by Custom Solar, where we've just been awarded a 4.5 MW, GBP 12 million on-site solar car park canopy project, where we're gonna be installing close to 10,000 solar panels across five buildings and three car parks, EV charge point solutions, and also integrates a battery storage solution with upgraded grid connections through G2 and Rock Power. It shows how all of our Gazelle acquisitions come together.
The next one to the right is an example of the mobile cell tower work we do, and we manage the site acquisition, design, and builds for a number of the mobile network operators and cell tower owners. We currently manage approximately 2,000 site upgrades and new builds each and every year. It's high volume, low cost in terms of size of project, but it shows the scale that we can actually deliver to the network operators. We carry out work in many hospitals and healthcare facilities. In UCLH, we recently delivered a GBP 4 million LED lighting upgrade program with minimal disruptions to an ever-busy, critical healthcare facility.
Lastly, for National Grid on the far right, and this is R H Irving, completed a GBP 2 million design and build security project in Huntingdon, which includes electrical fencing, LED lighting, site-wide access control, CCTV technology, as well as thermal imaging technology. So in conclusion, in bringing together our projects capabilities across the group, we have a leading market UK Projects business with an unrivaled breadth and depth in projects capability that can consult on, design, and build programs that transform a client's real estate portfolio, building the future so they can achieve their business goals. Based on the market trends, we foresee growth arising organically from our Mitie core clients and through continued strategic M&A that will enable us to reach GBP 1.5 billion of revenue by FY 2027, up from GBP 820 million in FY 2023.
Thank you, and I will now hand over to Maria to introduce the next section of the day.
I'm introducing the coffee break, everyone, so you'll be pleased about that. Thank you, Mark. Thanks. Okay, so we've now got our second coffee break. And during this time, we're gonna invite you to come to our transformation hub, which you've heard us all speak about. It's located just behind our café. You're gonna get a chance to see some of the technology that you've heard about. We've got some really great demonstrations. We've got AI over there, we've got virtual reality, so some very interesting things for you to get your hands on, and the majority of it is real customers, so you're gonna see dashboards and things from our real customers. So to help you move around the transformation hub, we have three hosts, and we've split you into three groups. So on your badge, you should have a colored dot.
If you don't, come and see myself or Kate, and we will help you. But we're gonna ask you to, if you have a green dot, to go with Cijo, our Chief Technology and Information Officer. If you have a yellow dot, we're gonna ask you to go with Dan, our Group Operations Director. And if you have a blue dot, we're going to ask you to go with Anindya, who is our Chief Digital and Product Officer. So, what I would ask you to do is, we've got two key demonstrations we'd really like you to see today. So please grab a coffee and make your way behind the café, where the demos... Your host will be there to, for the demos to start, and we'll be starting in around five minutes. Thank you.
... Okay, thank you. Well, good afternoon, everybody. I'm Peter Dickinson. I'm Mitie's Chief Legal Officer, and I'll be moderating this afternoon's panel session, which focused on our sector leadership and expertise. I've been at Mitie now for six years, having previously been a partner in a large international law firm, where my practice was mergers and acquisitions and also large-scale outsourcing. Here at Mitie, in addition to my responsibilities in terms of overseeing legal matters, I'm also responsible for commercial, risk, M & A, HSE, and our property function. So I work very closely with each of the divisional managing directors. In addition, I'm responsible for overseeing our enterprise risk across the business and also for overseeing the implementation of our ESG strategy, which, as Phil has mentioned, is key to our offering to our clients.
I'm joined, I was gonna say, on the sofas, on these rather uncomfortable stools, by the four managing directors. You've met Alice, Jason, Simon, and you've also got Brian at the end. I'd ask Brian, if you may, if you could introduce yourself.
Brian Talbot, I'm our MD of our central government and defense business. I've been in the outsourcing business for government for 30 years. I'm an electrical engineer by profession. I've worked in construction, advisory, design, construction, and services pretty much all my career and held the current position since 2006.
Fantastic. Thank you. Well, the purpose of today's session is to demonstrate how our technologies and capabilities filter out through our divisions, both into the public and private sector, and to focus on those areas where - demonstrate to you what facilities transformation means to our clients. We'll also talk about those areas where we have market leadership positions, and also how that will contribute to growth over the next three years. We are very keen for the sessions to be interactive, and at the end of the presentations, or the conversation rather, we'll give you all an opportunity to ask questions. If I could suggest, if you do have questions, non-financial, Simon will be following to talk about the performance going forward, and it'll be much safer if you address those to him rather than to any of us.
If I may begin, Alice, if we start with you, and could you give your view as to how facilities transformation is going to look for our public sector clients?
Yeah, and I'm really glad to talk about facilities transformation from a public sector perspective. It's something I in my heart, I really fly the flag for, 'cause if you think about the word transformation in a public sector environment, there are those out there, not me, who would say that actually there's a, there, they're a bit at odds with each other. It's not necessarily the part of our economy that we see as being transformative. But I think actually, when it comes to facilities, it absolutely is. Some of it's born of necessity, but some of it also from ambition. So if I just pick up, we've got the pillars of facilities transformation behind us. If I just pick up on a few of those where I think the public sector is really investing.
So if you look at productivity, those of you who heard, Cijo out in the transformation hub talk about how our portering solution is giving time back to clinicians. Just in John Radcliffe, in Oxford, that's given 5,000 hours back to our clinical teams, which is really worth a lot in terms of NHS productivity. Customer service. Well, in the, in the public sector, that's gonna be the patient experience or something like that. If you think about something like, infection rates in hospitals, so those-- That's gone up a third in the last 10 years. Hospital-acquired infections now cost the NHS over GBP 2 billion a year. And it goes without saying, it depletes the patient's experience. So when we can come in and show the efficacy of our cleaning, that's a real win that our clients are willing to invest in.
Just the last one I have to talk about is decarbonization, 'cause it is every client conversation at the moment. So all 212 NHS trusts, they all have a green plan. Over 300 councils have declared a climate emergency, so they are absolutely on top of it, and I see it coming through every day. So I think facilities transformation is absolutely where it's at in the public sector.
Fantastic. Brian, can I ask the same question of you, recognizing that in the defense estate, generally, it's been managed under, I think, what one we'd describe as managed decline for many, many years?
Yeah.
How is facilities transformation gonna work there?
Well, first and foremost, the average age of a defense asset is 50 years, so that kind of says it all. Coupled with the MOD buying expensive ships, planes, and ground equipment, all got to be housed in modern buildings and infrastructure. Coupled with, in order to attract and retain service personnel and their families, the living accommodation needs to be upgraded to improve the lived experience. An example of what we're doing in terms of transformation on our landmark joint venture subsidiary is, we've been replacing 70-year-old accommodation units across the training estate across the UK with quite modern facilities which incorporate solar, ground, and air source heat pumps, and effectively net zero in terms of their carbon. And that's really transformed the lived experience for the training troops of the UK.
I see that Brian and I visited the 70-year-old buildings earlier this summer, and the Dutch army were over in the UK training with us, along with many other NATO countries, and they refused to stay in them. And they were booked into a local hotel, which I'm sure they're very tough when they're on the battlefield. Simon, AI is dominating almost every conversation around business change. Focusing on our engineering business, can you try and give some sort of color? Is AI actually going to— Is it beginning to impact genuinely now, and how do you see change going forward, and at what pace?
... So it will 100%, it's definitely going to change the engineering landscape. It's going to change and transform all of our lives quite immeasurably. And I think Bill Gates, he got the odd thing wrong, but not that many, and one of the things he was 100% right about was the fact that it's going to have such a transformative effect. It will be the same as the introduction of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the World Wide Web and the mobile phone. And it will change the way we draw down healthcare. It will change the way that we communicate, we learn. And from an engineering perspective, we're already seeing huge advances in the optimization of performance, and it's already having a measurable impact.
So when you think about all of the things that I was talking about earlier, whether it's predictive maintenance, remote management and monitoring, data analytics, these are all driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning. And you know, it's going to change everything from traditional reactive services to very much proactive, predictive digital services. So putting the right engineer in the right place with the right part at the right time. So it's gonna have a pronounced impact.
Jason, in your presentation, you were referencing the surge in retail crime, the assaults on staff. Now, how is technology going to help us respond to those societal challenges?
Well, if there's one thing that's topical for all of us at the moment, we've all read with interest the increase in crime, particularly in the world of retail. I think our response to it is in two sections. One is our response as it relates to technology, and the other relates to our influence and our responsibility as the leading security provider, to help make critical steps dealing with some of these issues. Theft and, you know, crime has been around for years, as long as I can remember anyway. It's the extreme levels that we're experiencing today and the various sections of society it's impacting, both the workers and the consumer.
The backdrop that we are working within is one of reduced police numbers or decreasing police numbers, a backlog in the court system, and obviously, the impacts I spoke about. In relation to technology, we have to invest in intelligent technologies to help us capture incident data, to help us then identify trends in behavior of prolific offenders and organized crime groups, to be able to deploy our resources in a risk-based model rather than just throw some people everywhere. The second area of technology is replacing the agent CCTV. It's not just in certain states, it's across everywhere we work, but also improving the capability around making that CCTV mobile and developing body-worn cameras like we are doing, to create a live stream capability to be able to intervene at short notice.
And then looking forward, you've got to think about the emerging technologies with AI and facial recognition. And while we don't use facial recognition for live monitoring, we do use it retrospectively to confirm the identity of repeat offenders to our customer stores, and that enables us to work with law enforcement far better to drive that better result. And I referred earlier to you know, securing convictions. The good news, and I spoke to a number of our guests earlier around critical steps. We're now hearing senior politicians and senior police officials support the use of these technologies. I mentioned earlier, the police and Prime Minister openly supporting these emerging technologies. Professor Paul Taylor, the Chief Scientific Officer for the police, openly supports these emerging technologies.
So Sir Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has gone out and said that he sees facial recognition and AI being a game changer to as much as DNA has been for policing and security. So I'm really pleased as a practitioner to see critical steps being made to intervene and improve the environments we work in shopping.
Okay, thank you. Simon, coming back to you. Technical Services has been very successful in recent years, winning contracts to support critical national infrastructure in the UK, and, I'm thinking in particular of National Grid, and that's the air traffic controller. What is it, in terms of our offering, that has enabled us to win those opportunities?
So I think it's a multitude of things. If you think about critical national infrastructure, the priorities around protecting it and maintaining 100% uptime. So you've got physical security, which Jason's just talked about, where we have a leading position and capability, and then you've got cybersecurity, which Cijo talked about. Again, we have world-class credentials in that space. But from an engineering perspective, it's all about resilience. So if you take NATS, I mean, NATS is managing 8,000 air traffic movements a day. It has 116 remote communication sites across the UK. Every single air traffic control tower you see at airports is managed, and all of that's controlled by data centers, which are reliant upon heat and cooling.
And again, you know, from a power perspective, it's absolutely critical that all of those assets are maintained to 100% uptime. So when you think about our capabilities to apply AI and to predictively manage and maintain assets, including all of the backup capabilities like UPS and uninterruptible power supplies, off-grid solutions, so that we really provide those organizations with a much higher degree of resilience.... And it's the same with the National Grid, you know, that it, they're reliant on data centers to manage the power distribution across the entire country. So heating and cooling are critical assets, and power are critical assets for being able to maintain those services.
And then beyond that, we talked, Mark talked about some of our project capabilities, where we can deliver telecommunications solutions and off-grid solutions, like microgrids, distributed networks, and that just adds another layer of resilience for those organizations. So we're actually building a really commanding position within the market there.
Brian, picking up, Cijo mentioned digital twins and, in terms of technology solutions that are, either already exist or, or coming soon. My understanding is that digital twins currently are used in sort of new builds, initially at the sort of design phase. Are we seeing that in the existing, you know, the state that exists currently? If not, so what technologies are we seeing, and do you think we'll go to a point where digital twins will be common across all of, the estate that we look after?
Well, you're right, Peter. I think digital twins is being used in a lot of the new builds that we do, both in the design and in the building information modeling space. And it's proved very useful in terms of predicting the through life costs, the energy consumption, the utilization of those buildings. And it's slowly being used now in the operation. And if I can compare what the utility providers are currently doing, whether it's electricity grids, whether it's water, whether it's nuclear or telecom, most of those now are using digital twins to monitor the operation and the performance of their asset nationwide, and that has multiple benefits. It's there to predict failure using AI technology and algorithms. It's there to optimize maintenance. It's there to look at life cycle forecasting and improving the uptime and reliability of those assets.
Now, that technology is easily transferable into the existing facilities estate, so we are now being asked by customers to look at scanning 3D models of existing buildings to try and build up data feeds into those existing facilities, so we can better forecast maintenance requirements and obviously, life cycle and asset replacement. So it's coming. It's not mainstream in existing facilities yet, but my prediction is it won't be long before that, used in conjunction with CAFM systems, is used quite widespread across the UK, both in public and private sector.
Alice, coming back to you, on the same theme of, sort of facilities transformation, are there any particular technologies which you're either seeing deployed or you think will be deployed within a sort of communities-type environment?
Yeah. I think one that I'd pick out is one that you'll have seen today through different areas of what we've spoken about and also up on the screen, and that's virtual reality, so the headsets that we all know. But we, of course, know them more from consumer industries and from gaming. But actually, as a business, we've really adopted that technology in very diverse ways, and I know that we'll do more of it in the future. So that's one that I've really got my eye on. You think about what we're doing with virtual reality. You saw it earlier on the screen being used as a way of connecting engineers, one of whom might be at a central hub and one out in the field.
And what that means is that we can pair up engineers that perhaps have different levels of expertise or experience. In an industry where we know that we're in the middle of a bow wave of more senior engineers retiring, while we build that capability back up through apprenticeships, that technology really helps us to bridge the gap, so that's one way we're using it. You also will have seen it, the sharp-eyed of you, with Heather out in the transformation hub. In the video she showed there, we're using virtual reality as a training tool, particularly, for example, when we're training people in more high-risk cleaning environments. So you saw them right on the top of one of the U.K.'s railway stations. Again, that allows us to train in ways that is very hard to do actually without that technology.
And then just one more example, which is perhaps where you might not expect to see it, but within my care and custody business, we use virtual reality today. When someone comes into that environment, and it might be an environment they're really not used to, they're very nervous, we use virtual reality to give people a guided tour of the facility, the facility that they're coming to. And we found that it really helps people just feel much more comfortable coming into a space. It takes the tension out of a situation. So you might not expect to see it there, but it's there right now, and I know that with all of the innovators that you met, many more across our business, we're gonna find more ways of using technology like that, that started in one place, and we've taken it somewhere completely different.
Fantastic. We're changing the subject. If we can, you know, the needs statement, which are on the deck behind us, we've talked about accelerating the path to net zero. Well, Simon, in terms of Decarbonization Delivered, which Maria also spoke of, you know, we've acquired Rock Power Connections, G2 Energy, Custom Solar, all of which are focused on decarbonization. The Prime Minister's suggestion that perhaps things might move forward at a slightly different pace, is that impacting our business or likely to?
No. For three really clear reasons. One, the, you know, the fact that 83% of those buildings don't meet the minimum energy standards required by 2030, there is going to be, as I said, there will be a renovation wave, which is, if you're a landlord, you literally, you can command a premium if you have a sustainable building. If you don't meet those compliance thresholds, you have an asset that's worth nothing. That's a brick wall for landlords. They have to renovate those buildings and occupants as well. That's number one. Number two revolves around not just employees, people. You know, I think about my children, they are hugely climate aware.
People really care about the climate, particularly the younger generation, and I think, you know, we've just seen records that have broken through every single barrier and forecast this year, revolving around extreme temperatures. Regardless of the fact that it's an El Niño year, they are extreme. And so I think the fact that people really care about this, that will maintain a level of momentum in its own right. And then thirdly, is cost. You know, we're in an extremely competitive economic environment. Organizations need to constantly keep a really sharp focus on their overheads, their costs, and energy is a key component, where, as a consequence of global instability, we've seen oil prices fluctuate enormously. That's not gonna go away in the short to medium term.
Organizations need to actually secure their energy, and that's where microgrids and distributed networks come in, and have a key role to play. We're seeing demand go through the roof in that area as well.
Alice, coming back to you. Obviously, in terms of the public sector, there's enormous pressure on spending. NHS is clearly dealing with a whole sort of level of different challenges. Are they still... Notwithstanding that, are they beginning their decarbonization journeys? You've mentioned that they've all declared climate emergencies, but are they actually gonna do something about it?
Yes, they are.
Okay.
And I'm gonna pick up actually on a couple of things that Simon you mentioned just there is that I see very similar themes with the clients I look after. So you mentioned how much people care about the environment. People who work in the public sector, that is particularly true. So people in the NHS know that, for example, across all of the carbon emissions across the U.K., 4% of that comes just from the NHS. They know this stuff, and they care about it. They want to do something about it. Also, these are environments where you cannot just not pay attention to the impact that a changing climate is having. So again, Simon, you mentioned kind of what needs to happen when the climate goes beyond the parameters that we're accustomed to.
In a hospital environment, I think one, one hospital in particular, where we look after very acute, operating theater environments, they can only work when they are within particular temperature parameters. If they're outside of that, they're not functioning. So to keep that space working, we now need to think differently about HVAC systems, about how we cool those environments in ways that that building just hasn't been designed to deliver. So there again, you can't, you can't avoid this. If I think of how we can particularly help our public sector clients, maybe if I pick just one example, there's a university that we're working on, with on their decarbonization plan. So we've written their plan with them, and they are in a very particular bind. They are trying to expand the capacity of the university, you know, increase the income, increase the scale.
As we know, fees for students haven't gone up for two years. They're not gonna go up next year, so they've got a funding constraint there. It's a liberal university with a huge commitment to addressing the climate emergency, so it's a bit of a perfect storm. We can work with them really effectively on finding very efficient ways of reducing their carbon, because it's us, quite frankly, that runs the boilers. It's us that runs the cleaning teams. We know that estate incredibly well, and that means that as a partner, we're able to do things with them and get there faster than we would if we were coming as an off-the-shelf projects team.
Brian, you've talked about the facilities transformation generally within the defense estate, but in terms of decarbonization, how great a priority is that? Or is it more focused on capability rather than decarbonization?
In the public sector, it's no different from the private sector and some of the things Alice has mentioned. You know, primarily, they're decarbonizing because they want to reduce their carbon footprint, but they're also commissioning decarbonization projects to reduce their utility bills. Energy doubled in price over the last year, so they've got to get their operational costs down. And we're being asked on all of our projects now to do environmental and sustainability appraisals and optional studies to look at ways in which we can reduce not only the carbon footprint of the capital cost of the construction, but also through life, through low carbon asset management techniques as well. You know, putting in kit that lasts twice as long, you know, putting in filtration systems that can be cleaned rather than be replaced.
All these things are being considered in the projects environment now.
Now, Phil spoke about ESG and how important it is for us, and, you know, we see ESG as a sort of a thread that flows through all that we do as a business. And the S for us is as important as the E, and particularly when we look inwardly and we focus on our workforce and our colleagues. Jason, do you want to talk about how, firstly, about the Mitie employee value proposition and why that is so important to us, and why you think that makes a big difference?
Yeah. With 64,000 people, as Phil alluded to earlier, it's so important getting the end value proposition right. And our focus is on making Mitie a great place to work, and it's difficult to leave, okay? And the three key areas we look at, Alice referenced technology earlier, and we've talked a lot today about technology. Employees like to work in a technology-enabled environment. It makes their role more interesting, and they can see the results of their efforts far quicker. So, and we also saw the My Mitie app that Ollie Loach demonstrated over in our transformation hub earlier today. The second one is around reward and also in Phil's presentation, he referenced our industry-leading benefits. Three key ones stand out for me.
The first one is around the 24-hour access to online GP in an environment which takes you 3 weeks to get a doctor's appointment. Our employees have welcomed that hugely. Life assurance to all of our people and access to an employee engagement program for their families, and for their direct families as well, has been hugely important. And we've made a GBP 12 million investment into making every single Mitie employee a shareholder. So when you leave here today and you see a Mitie badge, they're a shareholder, and that's hugely important to us and to them. All of this is, you know, the measure for us is, well, what does that mean in terms of regretted attrition? Moving from 22% to what is today 13.7% is hugely important.
Post-pandemic, we're in a turbulent environment where we saw record numbers of vacancies and high levels of regretted attrition in the place of work. You know, that's important. I think looking ahead, I think we need to think about driving the skills agenda in that responsible transformation, making that transformational change in our sector. I am the proud chair of the Private Security Skills Board. We've been running for about a year and a half now, and we launched, Mitie actually contributed significantly to the launch of the first apprenticeship in the security sector, believe it or not, for the Level Two Professional Security Officer, and we're continuing our work in the world of apprenticeships.
We will be focusing on creating our own talent, generating our own talent, our own talent, through the Engineers of the Future, and focusing on green skills. You also heard that we've recently joined the Five Percent Club, where we have to have 5% of earned apprentices any one time. It's hugely important that our technology translates to our frontline heroes and ultimately results in a great place to work for Mitie.
I mentioned that, you know, one of the things that, ESG is incredibly important to us as an organization, but it's also a hugely important thing for us to win business. So, Brian, do you just want to talk briefly about social values in our public sector contract tenders?
So social value ESG is a measurable item in all of our tenders these days. So certainly recently, up to 20% of our technical marks for bids are based on our social value propositions. But at Mitie, we're a bit ahead of the game here because, you know, whether it be our employment credentials in relation to being a responsible employer, with our diversity policy, and also employing people from diverse backgrounds, or it's our skills and training policy and our employment of apprentices, which we do a significant amount of, or it's working with small medium-sized enterprises or voluntary community and social enterprises. We've done a lot of work in all those areas, and notwithstanding the environmental bit with our decarbonization plans.
So we've got a good story to tell in our bids, but we've got to customize those to the client requirements, and a lot of the clients want to know what you're going to do to positively affect the workforce and the SMEs and the supply chain in the areas that you're working. But we've got a good story to tell because we're a national provider. We're pretty much everywhere in the U.K., so we're well-positioned and quite confident in scoring as high as we possibly can, Peter.
That's good to hear. Changing subjects completely, it's difficult to avoid the political situation at the moment, and obviously, the Labour Party conference is drawing to an end in Liverpool as we speak. If I can quote Rachel Reeves in February 2021, as she's Shadow Chancellor, was speaking about government, future Labour government's policy in relation to outsourcing, and she suggested that they would introduce the biggest wave of insourcing of public services back in-house for a generation. My understanding is that that commitment was part of their National Policy Forum document, which was considered in Liverpool. I guess, Alice, from your perspective, how do you think a change of government would actually impact us as an organization?
Yeah, as you say, it's something we pay a lot of attention to. You know, Mitie has been up at the Labour Party conference this week and listening to what they've been saying. Keir Starmer said something earlier in the week when he was talking about working with business that I think was very relevant to how we think about this. He said, as long as I... "I don't think," he's talking to, you know, private sector businesses. He said, "I don't think we can do your job better than you can yourselves, and I don't think that we should try to." And I'm really engaged in that. Think about that word better. What does that mean?
The work that we do for the public sector, when they say better, they mean better outcomes for public sector clients and for service users, and they mean more efficient, do it more efficient and effectively than we can. And I think what we've shown through today, and we believe it very much in the businesses that we run, that we do, do these things to a level of quality and also to a level of efficiency that can't be done by competitors, which incidentally, is not just, you know, the competitors we might put up on a list, but is also the insource option. So I think that is, to be honest, is a very encouraging thing to hear, and I think it's, I think it's the right balance in the conversation. A couple of bits I would add. Outsourcing, not all outsourcing scenarios are equal.
The Institute for Government did a survey a while ago, looking at outsourcing in different areas of the economy, and they ranked them. The three that were at the top, they were green, because people saw the value of it, were cleaning, waste, and maintenance.
... Now it hasn't gone equally well in all areas, but where you've got the mighty wheelhouse, it is recognized that it's bringing benefits to our, to our economy. The last thing I'll just say is, if you look at the agenda that Labour in particular has put out there, we've got a lot of points of affinity there. If you look at things like wider use of the apprenticeship levy, you look at the creation of good quality green jobs, you look at giving every colleague equal pay for the work that they do, irrespective of who their employer is. That's all things that we're lobbying on, and we're absolutely in alignment with that. So we are there, and I think we're going to work effectively with whatever government we have, whatever colorful hue that takes in the future.
Brian, just briefly, defense of, in some respects, is a unique sector. Do you think there'll be any change? You've obviously experienced, having been at the, the sort of, the wheel of the business for many years through government.
We worked with the Labour government, and, you know, we've had some significant benefits from their outsourcing policy at the time, but things do change. We realize that. And I think they've also said, you know, at the time, they might consider insourcing some of these services. They will look, test the value for money at the point of these expiry of these contracts or on failure. And, you know, we're quite comfortable, as Alice said, around them testing our credentials in terms of the quality of services we provide and the price point that we offer. And indeed, in the past, I've certainly been competing with public sector comparators in the past, where they do have a PSC, and they evaluate that against the market, and we quite welcome that, to be honest with you.
Fantastic. Well, look, thank you for all your insights. What I'd like to do now, if we may, is just a very quick fire round. Key to our strategy going forward is growth over the next three years. So I'm going to ask each of you, as briefly as you can, because I'd like to have a chance for everyone to ask your questions, but to explain how, in your business area, we will be growing. So can I start with you, Alice?
So, yeah, three points I'd particularly focus on where our growth is going to come from. One is commercial contracts coming out, back out to market, post-COVID. That is now happening in a major way, and it's why Maria showed earlier that our pipeline's gone up by a third in the last two years. So that's one. The other is the growth of projects. Things like a GBP 10 billion backlog in NHS estates that has to be met, and that, again, is going to be a source of value. And then third is going to be all around decarbonization, particularly as we pick up new businesses coming into Mitie with particular skills. If I think about, Custom Solar, Rock, those are all companies that have a really healthy public sector footprint of their own.
It gives us a skill set that we can also take to our clients.
Jason?
Yeah, you know, visibility of our pipeline is key, and, and our pipeline also includes visibility of our, of our renewables, of our renewals, rather. Having the ability to develop dedicated operation centers gives you an early opportunity to renegotiate contracts. I'm really comfortable we've got good visibility of our, of our renewal, of all our renewals. We've also got strong visibility of, of large transformational contracts, which will allow us to bring our thinking around technology and expertise. The acquisition I mentioned earlier around R H Irving gives us a really good opportunity to penetrate the public sector, and you also saw from the chart that that's where our big opportunity sits.
Strong retentions, good pipeline visibility, and cross-sell and upsell around projects, which is, to be honest, as Mark alluded to, is fairly modest in the world of finance security.
A continuation also of your gazelle strategy, pursuing the acquisition of-
Yeah, capability feels important, particularly when we look at the changes in legislation I spoke about earlier.
Yeah. Simon?
So quick fire, and try and avoid repetition. We have a really solid blue chip client base, really solid pipeline. We talked about high retention rates. Our opportunity for growth, organic growth, with those customers is really high. So we would expect most customers, when we win a contract, to increase that by 20%, circa 20%. And off the back of some of the mega trends that we've discussed today, that opportunity is increasing, actually, because those organizations have got headwinds of their own, which we can help them address. So the opportunity to upsell, cross-sell, higher value services is very much in our gift at the moment.
I think from an M&A perspective, we're going to continue to build those core capabilities because they really differentiate us in the market, and there's a significant amount of demand for those services. So.
Brian?
Well, I mean, in defense work, the government is committed to spend an additional GBP 11 billion over the next five years, and from my understanding, Labour have supported that. So if there's a change in government, I don't see that changing. Some of that is for replacement of kit that's been gifted to Ukraine. Some of that is to contribute towards the replacement of the UK's nuclear deterrent, but some of that is to improve the lived experience and the technical estate across the UK. So some of that will flow down into improving asset conditions, upgrading and replacing those we knew. Coupled with that, the central government pipeline is fairly buoyant.
We can see line of sight of GBP 5 billion of that, within the next year, and that will be in bid, that's TCV, but, you know, a strong, healthy pipeline of all the big government departments outsourcing a lot more of their services and also committing to get to Net Zero by 2035, so that will aid the Projects business and pipeline.
And that M&A?
We are looking at a couple of bits of M&A. So we've got a couple of capability areas, and, and pretty much like, Jason, we're looking at either expanding the capability we have, adding a bit of scale or to look at things that we are outsourcing that we can bring in-house through an M&A purpose. So that's on the agenda.
Okay, fantastic. Look, Simon, obviously, in the next presentation, will talk in terms of hard numbers, in terms of, the growth. But if I could just open the floor and invite anybody who has a question of any of the panel members to, to please raise their hand, and, Eric will bring a microphone.
Chris Bambury, PwC. A couple of questions, if I may, kind of generally to everyone. Across FM over the last few years, we've seen a lot of consolidation, changing business models. How has that changed the competitive landscape and the dynamics, and how do you see that going forward? Second question would be, we had a lot of detail today on your competitive advantage through capability and technology. Could you give us a feeling of, against your key competitors, how far ahead are you? And more importantly, how sustainable is that competitive advantage? How quickly could it disappear or not? Thank you.
I'll take your last question first. So you heard Cijo talk about our 20 million filing cabinets of data. It took us two years to clean that data. So the barriers to entry for any of our competitors to catch up with us, they've got to complete that work. And that's the only way that you can apply machine learning and artificial intelligence. You have to have clean data. So the barriers to entry, I think, are really high from a competition perspective. And I think the technology that we have now is already supercharging our productivity, so that's reducing our cost per serve, which gives us an advantage as well from a market competitive perspective.
Chris, in answer to your first question, which is around market consolidation, we are twice the size of our nearest competitor. We're a full-service organization with, as, as we demonstrated, hopefully this afternoon, many more skills and capabilities than the competition. And I think we're seeing increasingly, almost as of right, we are participating in the large tenders. So we also have a, a high win rate. But the fact is, you know, Mitie has very strong brand recognition, and that therefore means we are getting access to these opportunities. So we think we still have a, a very obvious advantage, and I think it's clear from our M&A aspirations, we also look to participate in that consolidation activity. Thanks, Chris.
Please.
In relation to where we are, where we are in relation to our competitors, just, if I just think about security, we're twice the size of our nearest competitor. And we're, we are three times the size of our nearest competitor in the world of FM. And that's. It's really important to think about. We maintain our specialist approach, and we don't dilute that. And that really drives our acquisition strategy to continue to bolt on and build out that capability. Two interesting statistics. We are the third largest foreign security systems business in the UK in its own right, behind ADT and Shell. And out of the six leading security businesses, we are the only pure UK provider and the largest provider.
So, customers have faith and trust in what we deliver, and I think that alone stands for a lot of what we do.
Brilliant. Another question. Thank you.
Thanks. Thanks, it's James Beard from Numis. Following on from, the discussion you were having on the potential future Labour government, we obviously know that there'll be a general election within the next 15 months. What are your expectations based on, you know, history of, potential lack of activity around sort of new contract awards, during that time frame? And, to what extent does that sort of present, risk, opportunity to the, to the, to the sort of longer-term growth plans that you, that you aspire to see within Communities, CG&D?
Yeah, the answer at the moment is that we're not seeing a dip out in activity. Actually, I don't think that we're going to, for a couple of reasons. One is, you may have that trend happening in one direction, but in the other direction, there's a lot of pent-up contracting activity that didn't happen through the COVID years. And actually, the public sector was quite steady getting back into that trend contracting activity, so there is a bow wave of stuff that needs to happen. The other thing is, the areas of the public sector that we work on tend to be those that need to carry on regardless.
If you look at the work that we do in healthcare, in immigration, in Brian's world, in defense, this needs to happen, and actually, the procurement strategies the government's put out are pretty steady and solid at this point in time. I don't think, from what I see, that the impending change of government is going to particularly change them. I don't see a lot of people saying, "Actually, we're not quite sure where the policy goes, so we're not quite sure we can do this." I think there's more confidence than that with our public sector clients. Brian, I don't know what you see.
I mean, we've got some pretty big outsourcing opportunities ongoing at the moment and impending over the next few months, which will probably be concluded within the next 12 months. I don't see any appetite from any of those departments to stall those procurements, to change direction on those procurements at all. Quite the contrary, I think, as Alice said, you know, they've-- a lot of those contracts have been extended for reasons such as COVID, and, and they're very keen to market test those now and put their strategies in place over the next year or so. Most of those contracts will be let for... and quite long periods as well. You know, we're not seeing nought to 3 years anymore. We're seeing 5-10 year periods.
It's also probably just worth noting that under the public procurement rules, the ability of the contracting department to continually extend contracts is limited. It's often just a couple of years. So many contracts were extended through COVID. They do have to take them to market. So I think our view is that, you know, business will continue as normal.
... Another question?
Hi, Sandra from Stifel. One question from me, please. We've obviously heard a lot about your technology, and obviously, you've got a lot of blue-chip, multinational clients. Do you get clients asking if you could do the service in other geographies, and is that something you would consider over the medium term?
So the answer is yes. And I think when we look at the technology platform that we've created, the point that I made during my presentation around new opportunities emerging, so software as a service, as an example, we get a lot of clients where they want a single global data set, whereby they can manage a fragmented supply chain. So that's a real opportunity for us, I think. And it, it sort of wards off where we have... You know, and it's, it's rare, but it does happen, where we have customers that make that decision, that are going from local to global. It provides us with another anchor with the clients, so.
I think as well, in relation to other geographical areas, I think some of our U.K. customers need specific project capability. Obviously, I think helping the customers manage either through a third-party agreement or to engage directly with in-country companies. Customers want to trust the people they're contracting with. Also, if you remember and think about, we talked about Merlin, our investments into our technology. Our customers want to see that technology rolled out across a much broader estate. We talked about a case study earlier, and there's an opportunity there to scale that technology, first across Europe and then across the rest of the world. I think our focus is really on how we leverage our investments in technology to help transform a customer's experience.
Okay, I think we're probably... Unless there's one final question? If not, thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The next presentation will be Simon, but I think we have a short-
Okay, we've got a 1-minute break.
One minute.
While we move these chairs, and then we will have Simon, then we'll have the wrap up. And the good news is we're on time, if not a little bit early. As you can hear from these rather disconcerting corks being popped, that we're ahead of time. So let's get rid of these, and then let's get Simon up. Coming back. The other thing you... That question, that last question about other clients was a good one, because Jason mentioned that one of the case studies have asked us to look at Spain, for example, where we do have a business. And you saw that we bought a small security business in Spain, and it is a business that's actually growing, so that's an area where we might, we might find that easier to do that.
The other one I was thinking about, Mark, is in some of the Gazelles; they have been asked to do some work, particularly from the data center side. It's the same client in the UK, but they've asked us to do work in France and Holland, for example. So it's starting. So it's not a change of strategy that we're going to go into, back into new markets, but it's just starting to converge a little bit of how do we take our technology into, with, you know, with support, either from a client already or from an offer that someone else is going to pick up. So that's definitely part of our thinking. Okay, Simon.
Okay, thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Simon Kirkpatrick, Mitie's CFO. My job this afternoon is to bring together what you've heard so far today into a set of group numbers. I'll show what the three-year plan will look like financially. I'll show how our capital allocation policy is evolving to drive both long-term growth and enhance returns for our shareholders. I'll wrap up with a summary of our new financial guidance. Before I get into the three-year plan, I'm going to start with a financial reminder of what we've achieved compared to the targets that we set back in 2019. It'll show that Mitie's financially more than doubled in size since our last capital markets day. In 2019, we said we'd increase revenue by 50% to GBP 3 billion.
We said we'd reach GBP 200 million of EBITDA, with margins of 4.5%-5.5%. We set a free cash flow run rate target of GBP 20 million-GBP 30 million, and we said we'd maintain a high ROIC. And finally, we set a low leverage target, aiming to bring TFO, Total Financial Obligations, down to less than 2x EBITDA. Winding the clock forward 4 years, and the right-hand side of the page shows the report card analyzing how we've done. It shows that revenue's grown from around GBP 2 billion in FY 2019 to over GBP 4 billion in FY 2023.
EBITDA has grown from GBP 94 million to GBP 215 million over the same period, and while we haven't quite reached our 4.5%-5.5% margin target in FY 2023, we expect to hit it in the second half of FY 2024. Excluding the impact of closing the invoice discounting facility, our underlying free cash flow was over GBP 100 million in FY 2023, and ROIC remained high at around 25% compared to our 10% WACC. Net debt's come down significantly to just GBP 44 million in FY 2023, and we've closed all of our off-balance sheet financing facilities. As a result, TFOs come down to only 0.2x EBITDA. So we start our three-year plan on a strong financial footing.
The chart on this slide shows the revenue progress that we've made over the last 4 years. Over that period, Mitie's compound annual growth rate of 23% has been well ahead of the market growth of 5%. Acquisitions have accounted for around half of that 23% growth, including Interserve in FY 2021. But we've also driven substantial organic growth of 11%, underpinned by large core contract wins and cross-selling of project work. Looking ahead to FY 2027, whilst the market should give us a helpful 3%-4% tailwind, the business will grow much more quickly than that at high single digits. We heard earlier from the four MDs about how our technology, our capability, and our sector-based approach will help us to land more large FM customers.
Maria spoke about how our sales and marketing strategy is supporting pipeline growth, and Mark spoke about how we're leveraging our capabilities to get a larger share of capital works budgets. These organic improvements in core FM and projects will drive around GBP 800 million of revenue growth, two-thirds of the GBP 1.2 billion group revenue increase over the three-year plan. Supplementing this organic growth, we'll continue to make strategic bolt-on acquisitions like JCA and RHI, building our scale and capabilities in high-growth sectors. This organic growth will contribute around GBP 400 million over the next three years. I'll come back to this shortly, but before I do, I'm going to cover our 5% margin target.
As Phil said earlier, Interserve's margins were around 140 basis points lower than Mitie's when we acquired them, and since then, we've also faced some inflationary headwinds, which have cost us another 80 basis points of margin. However, despite those headwinds, group profit margins have increased by around 200 basis points since FY 2021, with the key drivers being our margin enhancement initiatives and synergies. Looking ahead, we face some of the same headwinds in the next few years that we faced in the last few years. The first is inflation, which has a double impact on margin. Firstly, while we expect that we'll recover over 90% of cost inflation through pricing between FY 2025 and FY 2027, the 10% or so of contracts where we're not able to price through inflation will cost us around GBP 10 million a year.
This is the equivalent to around 50 basis points of margin by FY 2027. Secondly, our margins are diluted by inflationary revenue growth, where we can pass on our cost increases, but we're not able to charge our customers a margin. The impact of this 0% margin revenue growth will be around 20% of margin—sorry, 20 basis points of margin. Taken together, these two inflationary impacts represent a headwind of around 70 basis points over the 3 years. As well as inflation, we face market pricing pressures. The FM market's highly competitive, and we therefore expect to see continued pressure on pricing in the next few years. We'll have to make disciplined, strategic choices in order to win contracts, and while we might reduce margins on some contracts, we won't participate in a race to the bottom.
The impact of this competitive pricing pressure could be around 30 basis points. We therefore expect the impact of these two headwinds from inflation and pricing to be between 75 and 125 basis points of margin by FY 2027. Offsetting these headwinds will generate around 150 to 200 basis points of margin improvement through management actions. First of all, we've built up a strong portfolio of margin enhancement initiatives that have delivered, on average, more than GBP 30 million a year of profit between FY 2022 and FY 2024. By shifting the focus from overheads to operations and contract efficiencies, we expect to land GBP 15 million a year of savings during the three-year plan.
We see these savings opportunities coming from areas like contract productivity, where we're using AI analysis on our cleaning contracts, from our new workplace app, which will drive efficiencies in how we deploy our security guards, and in the AI and tech that's helping us to reduce vehicle incidents and repair costs. We'll also make significant savings from operational leverage. Overheads have reduced from around 9% of revenue in FY 2020 to 7% in FY 2023, and we're forecasting a further reduction to 6.5% by FY 2027. This improvement equates to a 40 basis point improvement in group margins. And finally, our high-growth gazelles and increased project works will boost our margins. We expect to drive revenue growth in the Projects business at a 9% margin, which, over three years, will add 50 basis points to group margins.
As the project business grows, our group margins will also grow. Overall, after factoring in both the headwinds and our management actions, we expect margins to increase to at least 5% by FY 2027. Moving on to earnings per share. With margins and revenue increasing, EPS growth will accelerate. If we look back over the last few years, excluding FY 2021, which was heavily impacted by the pandemic, EPS has grown steadily by around 10% per annum. Over the next three years, EPS will benefit from the improved margins and potential share buybacks, which I'll come back to later. Tax rates and finance costs will also impact EPS. Our effective tax rate has been around 15% for the last few years, benefiting from the tax losses that we acquired with Interserve.
However, we'll have utilized all of these tax losses by the end of FY 2024, meaning that our effective tax rate will increase to 25% from FY 2025 onwards. Finance costs will also increase. I'll cover capital allocation in more detail shortly, but as leverage increases, finance costs will also increase, and we expect them to go up by around GBP 6 million by FY 2027. Turning next to free cash flow. Free cash flow has improved materially over the last three years, helped by our increased EBITDA, but also tight control of CapEx and a reduction in cash other items. As we look ahead to the next three years, cash will continue to benefit from these factors, as well as revenue growth and margin improvements.
We expect to make a GBP 25 million a year investment in working capital as we grow the Projects business and absorb some longer payment terms. CapEx spend will remain broadly consistent with the last three years at around GBP 30 million a year, and tax interest and leases will increase to GBP 120 million a year by FY 2027 as our fleet grows and our effective tax rate goes up. And finally, cash outflows for pension deficit contributions will reduce. The pension deficit is formally revalued every three years, with the last valuation of GBP 90 million being in FY 2020. Our expectation is that the FY 2023 revaluation will show that deficit has materially shrunk to less than half of that amount.
Firstly, because we've been paying GBP 13 million a year in deficit reduction contributions, and secondly, because the strength of our covenant has significantly improved. Our deficit, our pension deficit contributions will therefore reduce significantly over the next three years. Taking all of these factors into account, we expect free cash flow to reach GBP 150 million a year by FY 2027, which, at today's share price, represents a free cash flow yield of 11%. This free cash flow generation over the last three years has played a key part in reducing our TFO. Since FY 2018, we've reduced our TFO by GBP 400 million, closing all off-balance sheet financing facilities. As a result, at the end of FY 2023, we had only GBP 44 million of net debt on a post-IFRS 16 basis.
Underpinning this position, we have low leverage, an investment-grade credit rating, and good financial headroom. Interest on the majority of our GBP 150 million of long-term funding is fixed at 2.9%, and we've just increased our RCF by GBP 100 million to GBP 250 million on the same terms as our existing facility. The bigger RCF reflects the increase in the size of the group since we signed our previous agreement in 2021. With the business in a strong financial position and free cash flow growing, our capital allocation choices will increase over the next few years. In FY 2023, we returned GBP 44 million to shareholders through the dividend and GBP 50 million through share buybacks.
We also announced that we'd be purchasing shares in the market for all employee share schemes, thus avoiding shareholder dilution, and we spent GBP 20 million on bolt-on acquisitions. In FY 2024, we expect the dividend payout ratio to be 30%-35%, and we're halfway through our GBP 50 million share buyback program. The cost of the employee share purchases will more than halve from GBP 38 million in FY 2023 to around GBP 15 million in future years, because in FY 2023, we were catching up for three years of in-flight schemes. And finally, on current capital allocation, we've increased our acquisition spend this year. We've spent GBP 46 million so far, and we expect that to increase as we look to build the project capabilities that Mark spoke about earlier. My next few slides explain this increase in spend, starting with our recent acquisitions.
Looking back at the acquisitions that we've made over the past four or five years, we've added both scale and capability to the group. Interserve brought scale with over GBP 1 billion worth of revenue, helping to cement our market-leading positions in cleaning, security, and technical services. It also balanced our public and private sector portfolios. VSG was much smaller than Interserve, but for a relatively low price, gave us a good platform to grow our intelligent security offering. We've built on this capability with the acquisitions of Global Aware, Esoteric and RHI, and expanded in decarbonization, telecoms, and engineering through 8 further acquisitions. As well as the capabilities that Mark described, these acquisitions have been highly financially beneficial.
After taking account of the disposals, our net M&A has added over GBP 1.4 billion of revenue and GBP 75 million worth of profit for a net cost of only GBP 201 million. All in, that represents a payback period of about 3 years. This success gives us the confidence to increase our annual acquisition spend to around GBP 75 million a year for the next 3 years. Phil spoke about the macro trends driving growth in FM, and Mark explained our string of pearls M&A strategy, as well as the sectors that we expect to invest in. Financially, we expect these investments to be in high growth markets with higher than average margins, helping to maintain group ROIC well above our WACC.
Looking ahead then to how this increased spend fits into our capital allocation policy over the next three years, we'll maintain our progressive dividend policy, targeting a payout ratio of 30%-40%. We'll continue to purchase shares for all employee share schemes, avoiding any potential dilution. Acquisition spend will flex to the opportunities identified in any given year, but it could average around GBP 75 million a year. And we'll continue to return excess cash to shareholders through buybacks. As a result, depending on the scale of our acquisitions, leverage could increase a little over the next three years, but only to a relatively modest level of between 0.75 times and 1.5 times EBITDA.
My final slide is a financial summary, providing some headline guidance on where our plan will take us over the course of the next three years. Annual revenue growth will be significantly higher than forecast market growth, including both organic and inorganic growth and inflation. We expect average annual growth to be in the high single digits. Our operating profit margins will increase to at least 5%, driving cumulative annual EPS growth to be higher than revenue growth. Free cash flow will grow to GBP 150 million per annum by FY 2027, and ROIC will remain high as we invest in high growth, high margin gazelles. We'll continue to balance growth with shareholder returns, maintaining our 30%-40% dividend payout target and returning excess cash to shareholders through share buybacks.
Finally, we'll maintain our low leverage with a ratio of 0.75x to 1.5x EBITDA. On that note, I'll hand over to Phil for the wrap-up.
Okay, thank you, Simon, for that. Well, amazingly, we're still on time after a 1:00 P.M. start. So, thank you firstly to everyone who's presented today in Mitie. I hope we gave everyone a chance to see the talent we have in the company. And thank you to you, our audience as well. It's a big ask to expect you to sit there quietly for four hours and listen to us talk about Mitie on a Thursday afternoon. So we very much appreciate your time. And hopefully, as well, you by now better understand the opportunity that Mitie has within its facilities transformation strategy, and can see how our customers' needs are certainly changing, and changing rapidly, actually.
You heard from Maria how we accelerate growth to meet those customers' emerging needs of today, and we really focus on those needs today. Cijo talked about our technology investments to support the propositions that drive those delivery of those needs, but also that cost to serve advantage through straight-through processing. Alice, I think Jason, you and Simon and Mark Caskey did a great job just talking through our service line capabilities, the deep strengths that we believe that we have. I think, added with Brian, you know, you were talking about how we're delivering bespoke solutions to our differing clients' needs. So, you know, I'd like to think that the MitieVerse is something we can all now sort of understand a little bit more, and that Mitie truly is at the heart of the transformation of the built, built environment.
Hopefully, you've seen the passion and commitment to our new strategy of our team, with people like Simi on the team. We are not short of people who are talented and really believe in what we are building here as a company. You'll have heard that ESG is certainly not a box-ticking exercise for us; it's very much the way we run our business. And in the technology breakouts, I hope we have demonstrated that data and analytical capabilities. I was chatting to one of our investors saying: Why don't you sell it separately? And it is something that we have discussed from time to time. You see Cijo nodding there, but we'd like to get it working in our business first before we let other people play with it.
And, hopefully as well, through Simon now, you've got a—you've seen a financial plan that, like us, you believe we can deliver for our shareholders. So it's that passion, that talent, those capabilities, the focus we have, the ways we work, that I think makes us the market leader in winning new strategic accounts in a changing world. I think it makes us the partner of choice for our existing customers. That's why I think our retention is as good as it is, to upsell and cross-sell our products and services. And tonight, you'll meet a couple of our so-called gazelles. Hopefully, you'll get a, you know, people will realize that Mitie gives confidence to owners of smaller niche companies that indeed, Mitie is the place where their businesses and their people can really thrive, and grow.
So taking in the round, and with the disciplined financial track record that Simon has led now for at least the last 2 years, we're certainly confident today that we will succeed in our journey from facilities management to facilities transformation. And as we have done over the last 4 years, we have set stretching targets, and Simon's laid those out for the next 3 years, but we believe we will deliver those 3-year targets. And on that point of last 3 years, or the future 3 years, not the last 3 years, I've been here for coming up 7 years now, and you'll have read this morning that I've committed to the board, if they want me, but to stay on as CEO of Mitie for the next 3 years, to ensure this plan is absolutely delivered.
I'm staying on because I believe in this team, I believe in the capabilities that we've built, I believe in our strategy, and I believe that this company's determination to win will make us the most... It make this the most successful period in Mitie's history yet. So thank you again for joining us for our capital markets event. We're gonna turn over to Q and A's, and please don't rush off at the end because we have a drink and something to explain for a little wine tasting. So over to questions. So this is where we get all the, this is where we get all the questions from yesterday that everybody wanted to ask about the half year update, which we were trying to avoid, but of course, now, welcome James, and shoot.
Thank you. James from Numis. Surprisingly, I'm not gonna ask you about yesterday's trading update. Couple of questions. Firstly, on M&A. Can you talk to how you sort of identify core potential opportunities, and the competitive dynamics when you're actually bidding for the, the, the businesses that you're seeking to acquire? There's obviously a couple of sort of smaller engineering services, focused roll-ups, now they're owned by private equity, have been pretty active in the space over the last couple of years. So just interested in the sort of dynamics in the bid process, and whether that's having any impact on pricing of those, of those assets as well.
Then second question, going back to the sort of the data and the technology piece, clearly, you know, your business is collecting a heck of a lot of data on a daily basis. Presumably, that's gonna mean an ongoing, sort of, exponential increase in the data that you're holding in storage. What does that mean in terms of your needs to sort of keep future-proofing the systems, the technology stack that you currently own and that you currently have? And, how is that sort of factored into future sort of CapEx guidance as well?
Okay, well, I'll let Cijo deal with that second question. But the first one about the M&A, actually, we've... I don't know if Rajiv is here now. He's not, is he, Pete? We haven't seen him. He was earlier. We have actually appointed somebody to help Peter support originating more M&A deals. You know, I said that we were increasing our investment in M&A, and so we are putting a bit more resources into it. Rajiv joined us from one of the Big Four accounting firms doing M&A, and I think it sends a... Firstly, it's a signal about our intent, and that we want to really pick apart all the market opportunities and do some real analysis of the sets of opportunities that we have.
So that indicates, I think, that we'll be a bit more analytical around the opportunity set, and perhaps seek out the opportunities that are right for us, not necessarily just deal with what comes in on the inbound. Now, on that point, a number of deals that we have done, and one we're still in the middle of trying to do, we were hoping we might close it before today, but we haven't done, have come out of failed PE exercises. And that's quite an interesting period at this time because you've got high levels of cost of debt, and not every PE deal and conversation has resulted in it being closed. And if you think of our position, our cost of ten-year money on average is 2.9%.
So, so we, we can move quickly when deals come back to the market, and I think as well, we can demonstrate to a seller just how much, leverage, through our customer access, we can bring to the business. Hopefully, over a drink, you might meet Matt Brailsford. Matt, are you here yet?
He's sick.
We've got... Oh, he's sick, is he?
Yeah.
All right. It's very unusual for him. Matt came from Custom Solar, but he now heads up all our construction and decarbonization efforts. And in some ways, it's better for him, being an entrepreneur, to have conversations with other entrepreneurs about what life in Mitie is really like. And I encourage you to meet Ian Jackson, who I know is coming for a drink. He is the founder of JCA, which is a top-class engineering business. 125-250 top-class engineers design over GBP 100 million of revenue. It's a proper company, and he's done a really good job. And he sees the opportunities that we can, Mitie can bring as well. So I think we're quite optimistic about the M&A as a key element of our strategy.
And you look at our, those chevrons you saw of those growth pillars, they're sort of broadly sized for where we see the opportunity, because I think the core winning new accounts is still the biggest opportunity we have, as I said. Cross-selling is a lesser opportunity, but still large. M&A is sort of the sort of icing on the cake, but we are looking to commit, Simon, you mentioned it, GBP 200 million of M&A over the next sort of four years, including this year. Did you mention that?
I didn't.
You didn't, but I've just mentioned it. So that sort of gives you an idea of our appetite there.
I said we might spend GBP 75 million or so a year. So...
Okay. Data, Cijo?
Yeah, just on the... I use two strategy, which we have got. One is cloud and cyber. So the... I mean, you've seen my chart from 2020 onwards. We had a cloud strategy enabled, fully cloud strategy enabled. So our strategic partners, which is Microsoft and AWS, and that's what we use for our cloud enablement, and the elasticity and the resiliency they bring help us to create infinite capacity of data which we store. So that's one point. They also bring the cyber resilience through their own platforms, and on top of that, our cyber investments, which I talk about, the layers of tools and techniques which we put in place to protect the data, also enable us to keep bringing as much data from either IT or OT technologies and scale infinitely.
I mean, just on that point about cyber, I mean, I was on a call with the government to curate a number of, you know, sharing information around strategic suppliers, just so that everyone gets a sense of what's the, you know, what everyone else is grappling with. And we know, because we do the research, on NIST score, N-I-S-T, is the highest of all our competitors.
That's right, yeah.
We have an A 95, and we, you know, it's like the C only the CIA and FBI, you know, is higher than that. So we know we're in a good place there.
So we use two, Phil. One is Cybersecurity Scorecard, which is an independent body, and that's where we are A 92, which is about A 90. The NIST score is from level zero to level five.
You're right. Sorry.
We are at level four.
Four.
That's what we meant.
Sorry, yeah, I got that right. I was mixing... Yeah, you're right. I got that one wrong. NIST is this level out of 5, we're level 4.
Yeah.
So we're the highest of our competitors. Just to clarify that point, as Simon was whispering to me, we actually said GBP 300 million M&A over a 4-year period. So including this year, 300, and that's sort of how you get your 75 a year on a go forward. But we might, we might do a bit more than that this year. We'll have to see.
Yeah. It'll be a little bit lumpy, as I said.
Okay, next question. Michael?
Thanks, Michael Brown, Lombard Odier. Just a question around the technology bit. Two questions, really. Firstly, you talked about clients potentially wanting you to do this internationally, but is there a way... I know you're using external technology providers as part of the overall technology piece. Is there scope for that technology wrapper, if you like, to be out, you know, given to others to, to use outside of the UK? And secondly, how should we think about technology as a contributor from a revenue and EBIT, EBITDA perspective within the group, given this pretty impressive, I thought, the demonstrations, and, and they're obviously significant value add to, to your customers?
Yeah, let me, let me give them a shot at it, and then maybe Cijo and Simon then. You're- you've been developing... Where's Simon? You've been developing, software-as-a-service opportunities. I think right now, it's a sort of a bit of a twinkle in our eye, so it's not a big element of this next three-year plan. That's not to say we're not putting effort behind it, but it's, right now, I'd say we're using technology to win business. That's going back to our staying focused. But we don't rule out partnering with software companies. I mentioned today, well, yesterday, we signed a deal with Salesforce.com to do joint marketing on net zero carbon reporting.
If you look at the obligations now on carbon reporting, that are placed on companies here in the UK, there's a lot of people involved in picking data up from all sorts of sources to meet the requirements of net zero carbon reporting. And so using a software developed with, jointly with Salesforce.com, essentially, we can latch on to the energy-consuming assets that we look after, and then from the knowledge of the usage of those assets and the run monitoring of those assets, we can build up a picture of the carbon footprint from the energy consuming assets in a building. And then if you've got that linked straight through into a carbon reporting tool, then it can save our clients a hell of a lot of effort.
You know, I can think of one client that's got nine between our people, their people, and the current software, they've got nine people working on carbon reporting. So that's like that's just like one example. I mean, Simon, you're Simon Cijo, international wrappers, software as a service. I know you're thinking about it.
Yeah, 100%. I think Phil's point is that these technologies are emerging as we speak, so actually, all of the technology companies that we're working with are working really closely with us because they're also looking to prove the model, but it provides them with a channel to market as well. We're the experts around building infrastructure. They're the experts from a technology perspective. So there is a degree of interest from very large organizations, public sector organizations, in the main, who have huge fragmented supply chains, because one of the key components for any of those, if you take the NHS as a good example, you know, they don't know how many assets they've got, so they can't manage their cost base effectively. So anything that enables them to do that is going to be of interest.
So it's moving. It's a moving piece, but it's moving fairly rapidly, and as I said in my presentation, I think a lot of these new opportunities are just beginning to emerge now.
I have a hat that I promised to eat if Simon ever lands a large software as a service piece of business. But Simon was also the person that won us most of our COVID business, where I also had a small hat that I ate. So I wouldn't rule it out, but it's definitely not part of this three-year plan, but I think in three years' time it could be quite interesting. The other thing I should mention on the three-year plan, when Peter was looking, asking the team around their growth plans, we haven't baked in. There's some big whales out there. I mean, there's literally GBP 100 million-a-year accounts that we don't bake into that growth. We're sort of, we're looking at, you know, the sort of the day-to-day stuff, but we don't bake in the whales.
But if we were to win them, and there are some out there, then that would be upside on the growth that we have. But it's binary. The whales tend to be in public sector and, therefore, you know, they're, you know, they—it's a formula, and computer says X, and you're either in or you're not. So we don't bake those in.
And Phil, just to build Michael on, on the point and to answer your question about the tech improvements. So I spoke about GBP 50 million a year of margin enhancement initiatives that we see coming through over the course of the next 3 years. Part of that is founded on those tech improvements that you were asking about, and I mentioned some of those in my presentation. So, you know, to Phil's previous point, there's an opportunity for us to go further than that, but what we see at the moment and what we've baked into the plan is what we're confident about.
Anything? Come on, where's Kean? It's very unlike you, Kean, not to have any questions. What's that?
Needs a drink.
Kean needs a drink. I stand between you and a drink, but we're happy to... If we have no further questions, we'll close off the filming now. Thank you for those listening in. One last one over here. The gentleman over here. I'm sorry. We were chatting earlier on. Forgive, forgive me.
Yeah, sorry. Mark Harrison from Downer-
Mark.
Could you just tell us a sort of basic question, that in the areas where you're doing more asset transformation, what the average job size is in that, and job length as well. Simple.
So HEV, average transaction value of a project. Mark, what would you say? I'd be up about GBP 300,000, something like that? I'd say just less, just less than that. Pardon? Just less than that. Just less than. Between GBP 250,000 and GBP 300,000. GBP 250,000 to GBP 300,000. Yeah, there's some small... It's like Lloyds Bank. I mean, every week, we use Salesforce for recording all our sales. I mean, every week, there's, you know, a stack of LED lighting projects, stack of, fire and security system rip and replace. They just come, you know, they just come through all the time. I mean, that's, that's how you, you know, it's-- I won't use Lloyds as an example, but, you know, there are many clients where the total rev-- of the total revenue we have with the client, half is project work.
almost invariably, Mark, that project work, as Phil was saying, it's with the primary client. So we're not working with an intermediary, we're not working with a contractor somewhere else. And therefore, from our perspective, that brings the risk down, both in terms of, because the size of the projects is relatively low, high volume of low value projects, and because we're working with the clients who we generally already know.
That was a really good point that Mark made as well, because Simon has the scars on his back from working in construction, as a tier two provider, i.e., somebody wins the business, they bid it too low, then they screw down the supply chain. That's not what we want to do.
That's right.
JCA, our principal contractor, they deal directly with hospital trusts, for example. Thank you for your questions. We'll close off the film there. I will introduce Kate. Is it Kate?
Yes.