VP Rail, and the team will cover a bit more background about the rationale behind that. But it might be helpful for you to see this first and hear an explanation from the person who is going to be running it. So let's go now.
The establishment of VP Rail, with the sectors that we're dealing with and the skill sets that we bring forward with that, sets us apart from our competitors because of the breadth of service that we can supply, the decades of experience and knowledge that we have within the industry, the backup service. We're 24/7, 365 days a year. Any customer in any activity within the rail sector, be it track renewals or buildings and civils, can send an email, make a phone call to one center, and they will be given the services of the VP businesses through that portal. The vision of VP Rail is to give our customers access to the VP group of companies from a single point of contact. We'll still be using the expertise of the people that we've got within our businesses, and we see this as a game changer within our sector.
The skills that we can provide, not only the plant, but the services and the dedication and experience provided within our business, is totally unparalleled. We can supply operatives throughout the UK, be it in the north of Scotland to the south of the country, into South Wales and into Yorkshire, and anywhere that is a railway we have got the capabilities to supply to. Through the 2000s, VP Rail was engaged with the West Coast Route Modernization Upgrade, which at the time was the biggest project in Europe, covering over GBP 8 billion of expenditure at the time. VP Rail had been working on the Transpennine project across east and west, linking Manchester with York. VP Rail has worked on some really big projects in the capital, particularly Crossrail, where we worked at Abbey Wood and Maidenhead. We worked at Stockley.
We're also working on the HS2 program between London and Birmingham. Our compliance and assurance teams have been in the industry for several years, very experienced in what they do. They understand what it takes to work on the rail environment. VP Rail were very easy to transact with because you'll get all your communication, survey, track renewal, or maintenance equipment from one solution and get the expertise of the VP group of businesses from one place.
Right, I hope that was useful. A little bit of admin first before we start. You can submit questions via the Zoom function, and the management will do their best to go through all of those later on. This presentation is being recorded as well. If you miss anything, we can go back and cover it independently. Without too much ado, let's just make that full screen mode. I shall now pass over to Anna Bielby, the CEO, and who will be joined by Keith Winstanley, the CFO, to go through the presentation.
Thanks, Andy. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us for the presentation of the VP interim results. As Andy says, I'm Anna and joined today by our CFO, Keith Winstanley. I'm going to kick off with a brief summary of our results, an update on our strategy. Keith will then cover the financial review, and then I'll update on our operational performance. And as Andy said, there'll be time for any questions that you might have at the end. So moving on to our group, I'm sure many of you are familiar with our business, but to summarize, we are leaders in equipment rental with a key focus on being specialist. We operate in niche end sectors, mainly within infrastructure, construction, house building, and energy.
We have a resilient operating model and diverse revenue streams, and we have a strong track record of high returns and an uninterrupted dividend track record going back over 30 years. Our divisions are listed on the bottom of this slide, but we increasingly talk about our business in relation to its end markets. Next slide, please. Moving on to the half one highlights. Overall, our performance was robust, with revenue and profit broadly in line with last year. Our key measure, our Return on Capital Employed, remained strong at 14.7%, demonstrating earnings quality. From a market perspective, infrastructure was strong, with particular demand from the water and transmission sectors, with the slowest start in rail. Energy also performed well, but construction and house building continued to be challenging.
We remain committed to investing in our asset base, and fleet CapEx in the period was GBP 38.5 million, with a focus on growth areas and also the continued transition towards cleaner, greener solutions. We continue to have a strong balance sheet, and that allows us to invest and position as well for future opportunity. And despite some headwinds in the first half, we're declaring an interim dividend of GBP 0.115 per share, which is consistent with last year. We've made good progress on our refresh strategy, and I'll update with a bit more detail later on, and that includes the early October acquisition of CPH. And we expect our full year performance to be in line with market expectations. So moving on to our investment case, I've covered some of these points already, so I'll just pick out the key highlights. The main thing is we are specialists.
That's what differentiates us from others in our industry, and it's served us well over the years, and it has provided resilience for our business model. We also have exciting growth prospects. We are aligned to markets with significant investment and growth potential, and that's particularly in infrastructure. And we also have a number of self-help opportunities available to us to improve our performance, which I'll touch on later. As I mentioned, our financial profile is strong, and overall as a business, we're well positioned. So moving on to our strategy. We set out our refresh strategy in June, and I'm not proposing to go through all of the detail again, but the key theme is around ensuring that VP is a more straightforward business and greater than the sum of its parts.
The main areas of the strategy relate to delivering growth, where we see key opportunities for our businesses to work more closely together and driving operational excellence to do things in a more straightforward way, and all of this is enabled by having the right team in place, investing in our digital roadmap alongside a continued focus on ESG. One of the things that we've done in the first half of the year is commissioned some independent customer feedback, and that feedback showed lots of positives. It talked about our people, it talked about our deep specialism, and it talked about our agility, but it also highlighted what we already know, which is that we need to be a bit more joined up in terms of how our divisions work with one another and also how we approach and support our larger strategic customers.
Our work in the last six months, therefore, has been focused on exactly that, ensuring that our divisions can work better together. I think we've made some good progress, and I'll talk you through the key points. From a divisional collaboration perspective, our senior teams are now working more closely together, and the work that we're doing on our digital roadmap will facilitate this and make us easier to do business with. We're also increasingly thinking about our business from an end market perspective, and this is particularly important given the significant spend commitments and increases in spend commitments that we see across particularly major infrastructure projects, and to facilitate this, and as you've already seen in the video, we've appointed our first end sector specialist, a director of VP Rail, and that's to lead our rail offering across the growth.
Continuing the growth agenda, we explained in June that M&A would be a key part of our growth story, and we were pleased to complete the acquisition of CPH, a specialist powered access business in the Republic of Ireland in early October, and Keith will talk about that in a bit more detail shortly. Another important part of our progress is around our operating model, making sure that we're set up in the best way to best support our customer and also ensure that we are operating as simply and efficiently as possible. In the period, we've continued to make progress, and we're now transitioning certain functions to the centre. For example, our rehire activities, the management of our major strategic customers alongside property and procurement, and I'll cover a bit more on that in a while.
Then to do all of these things, we need to ensure we have the right team, and I'm really pleased that in the period, we have appointed new leadership in IT, in health, safety, and sustainability, and also in procurement. So I mentioned our refreshed operating model, and I think this slide provides a bit more color on that. The changes that we're making are to ensure that we are set up in the best way to both support our customers and also to operate efficiently. Our specialist divisions are in the center of this diagram, and they're at the heart of our business, and we have no plans to change our divisional structure or the agile individual teams that support our customers.
But we know that we can unlock more opportunity if we think about our business in a slightly different way and listen to some of the feedback that we've heard from our customers. We're therefore moving to a model where overall management of our major strategic customers and our rehire activities will sit centrally. This will give our customers simple access to all of VP and will make us easier to do business with. This represents a change for VP, and it will enable us to drive growth. As I mentioned, we're also increasingly thinking about the group from the perspective of end market to ensure that we're well positioned to take advantage of the significant projects where we know that multi-billion pound spending commitments exist, and our appointment of Carl Abratus, as director of VP Rail, facilitates this.
Our specialist divisions and our group-wide offering are then supported by efficient group functions using our scale and technology through our digital roadmap to do things in a simple and consistent way. Some of these changes can be made immediately, and some of these changes will take a bit more time. Some of these changes are about driving revenue, and some of these changes are about reducing our cost base or indeed mitigating some of the cost headwinds that we see coming our way. But overall, we see a big self-help opportunity from refreshing the way we work. I'm now going to hand over to Keith, who will cover our financial review.
Thanks, Anna. Good morning, everybody. We'll get straight into our financial highlights. As you can see, our key financial metrics are all broadly in line with H1 last year. As Anna has already touched on, the picture across our end markets is similar to that at the year end, with infrastructure and energy being generally supported, but challenges remaining in general construction and house building. The main change has been in rail. Whilst we remain optimistic about the opportunities in rail, the slower than anticipated start to CP7 has impacted the half, and therefore to produce results broadly in line with last year's H1, I think demonstrates the robust nature of our diversified business model.
Return on average capital employed, or ROCE, has improved slightly from the year end at 14.7%, although this figure does include around about 0.6%, which is the impact of the goodwill impairment that we recorded at the end of last year. We haven't recognized any exceptional items in H1. We do expect some in H2, though, and these will relate to corporate developments and operating model changes, and we'll touch a bit on both of those in the remainder of the presentation. Moving on to the balance sheet. The balance sheet remains strong and robust, and it positions us well for future opportunities and investment. In fact, we increased the investment in our rental fleet from GBP 28 million to GBP 39 million in the period.
The credit environment remains challenging, but I'm pleased to say that our focus in this area has resulted in both improvements to DSO and lower bad debt write-offs. Net debt's increased by around GBP 15 million since the year end, and I'll cover that in a bit more detail over the next few slides. So this slide shows the movement in net debt since the end of the year. In terms of inflows, cash generation remains strong, and it's consistent with the comparative period. In terms of outflows, we continue to be disciplined in how we allocate our capital. We continue to invest for growth by investing back into our fleet. We pay interest, and we pay our taxes, and we return funds to shareholders via our dividend, which is uninterrupted for over 30 years. The working capital outflow that you can see includes an element of seasonality.
It also includes cash outflows relating to previously recorded exceptional costs, and it also includes the return of a large customer overpayment from the prior year. I expect some working capital over H2, though, working capital improvement over H2. I just wanted to remind everybody of our finance facilities. So including our overdraft, we have around about GBP 190 million of facilities, and these include two fixed-rate low-cost private placements, the first of which matures in 2027. We also have a GBP 90 million revolving credit facility, which we have just extended for a third year. This facility now matures in November 2027. Our facilities are subject to two financial covenants. One's around interest cover, and the other is a net debt to EBITDA gearing ratio.
We operate well within these covenants, and we currently expect our net debt to EBITDA gearing to be around about 1.5 times at the end of the year. We continue to operate with significant headroom and well within our covenants. We have the funds available, and we will continue to allocate them with discipline. So we are committed to maintaining a young and well-invested rental fleet. We increase the investment in a period either on a gross basis or considering the investment net of disposals. We allocate our capital to areas which we believe will maximize growth. Currently, the German transmission market represents a significant opportunity for the group. Between now and 2045, the German grid has been expanded, and it's been transitioned towards renewable energy sources. During the period in Germany, we invested around about GBP 7.5 million in steel panels to provide temporary access solutions to network locations.
This investment is expected to be ROCE accretive, and it's relatively low risk given the long lifespan and high residual values of the panels. We continue to consider environmental factors as part of our investment decisions, and that was no different in this example. From a logistical perspective, these panels were transported as close as practically possible to customer sites using boats and barges rather than the more typical and environmentally unfriendly road networks, and in order to do that, we had to do various things, including creating a temporary proof station at Hannover Docks. More broadly, though, across the group, more than 50% of our H1 fleet purchases were zero emissions at point of use. Moving on to our returns and our dividends, I presented these two charts at the year end, but I think they do a really good job summarizing the financial strength of VP.
The top graph shows our ability to deliver remarkably consistent and strong returns over several years. The bottom graph shows our dividend story, and as I said already, we have our uninterrupted dividend stretching back over 30 years. And despite some headwinds in first half, we are declaring an interim dividend of 11.5p, consistent with last year. So moving on to M&A, so our growth strategy is a combination of organic growth and M&A. We've already looked at organic investment, and now I'm just going to focus for a second on M&A. When we presented our refresh strategy back in the summer, we set out the criteria for acquisitions and also that we would consider selective disposals in order to best deliver our strategy. And from an acquisition perspective, we said that we were looking for businesses that were specialists with growth potential.
We said that they needed to provide access or extensions to geographies, assets, or sectors. They needed to meet strict financial hurdles, and they needed to fall within risk appetite. And just after the period, we were really pleased to acquire CPH for an initial consideration of EUR 12 million. CPH is a business that falls right in our sweet spot as it does one thing very well and focuses on very specific end markets, typically clean rooms that are used within pharma technology and food and beverage. CPH has immediate opportunities to grow with its existing customers, and we are looking forward to taking advantage of the buoyant Republic of Ireland market, which has strong growth potential both for CPH and also the wider group.
A few weeks in, and the integration has been going very much to plan. Existing management remain with the business, and both CPH and our other divisions are exploring ways to maximize the opportunity of having CPH as part of the group. This is likely to be the only acquisition that we make this year that represents a new division. Any other activity in H2 is more likely to be smaller bolt-ons to existing divisions. Quickly turning to divestment, we continue to look at options to rebalance the group's offerings. Just go back for this one, please, Andy. Thank you. We continue to look for options to rebalance the group's offerings, including options for divestments. We continue to look at our businesses in terms of returns, growth potential, and alignment with strategy, which is increasingly focused on divisional cross-collaboration and end market specializations.
Just before I hand you back to Anna, just to summarize this little section, we've seen robust financial performance in the half. We've seen that we operate well within our finance facilities, but we've targeted investment where we see organic growth opportunities, and we've just seen progress against our strategy with the post-period end acquisition of CPH. Anna, back over to you.
Thanks, Keith. I'm now going to run through our operating performance for half one, which will be focused on the end markets that we serve. I'm going to start with infrastructure, which is our largest end market and the area where performance has been strongest and where we probably see most potential, and we categorise infrastructure as rail, water, transmission, and other. In rail, there is a significant market opportunity with GBP 45 billion of spend in CP7 and a number of major projects ongoing, and crucially, the government did not cancel any significant major projects as part of the budget. As I mentioned and as you've seen, we have appointed our first end sector specialist in this area to provide leadership and coordination across our divisions in this important area.
As well as supporting our major projects, we also work closely with Network Rail on the scheduled maintenance of the rail infrastructure. Our performance in half one on rail was lower than the equivalent period last year due to the change from CP6 to CP7 and a level of further delay caused by the government change in the summer. Despite this, we remain optimistic about opportunities in this important sector over the five-year control period. In water, at GBP 88 billion, AMP8 represents a significant spending commitment, which is much increased on AMP7. We believe we are well placed to take advantage of that with the focus on sustainability and ESG serving our specialist business as well. Our work in water supports a number of areas from pipeline construction, enhancements, and portable roadways through to the hire of highly specialized assets to perform surveys and testing.
In the first half of the year, our revenue in water grew. In transmission, there is a significant market opportunity both in the U.K., where the National Grid has a GBP 30 billion five-year commitment, and also in Germany, as Keith alluded to, where up to EUR 500 billion is expected to be spent between now and 2045. Our work in transmission is focused on portable roadways, on groundworks alongside survey, test, and measurement. And again, in half one, we've seen growth as we've been able to take advantage of the significant market opportunity within transmission. And as Keith mentioned, a good chunk of our half one CapEx was focused on the transmission market, particularly in Germany. The next couple of slides will showcase some of the work that we're doing in rail and in water.
This case study is a multi-million-pound rail track enhancement project which started last month, where five of our divisions are working closely together to offer a true group-wide solution to our customers. On this project, our specialist divisions will provide all plant requirements for the project supported by our people, which includes an operational team, a central hire desk, and also centralized management. We're also working with the customer to ensure that our approach uses innovation and also thinks about ESG with battery technology being used where appropriate. We expect to be involved in more of these group-wide projects, and our new operating model and our director of VP Rail positions us very well to deliver. This case study shows some of the work that we do within water, which is another end sector which represents a strong opportunity for us.
Our Groundforce division was involved in this project with Scottish Water to ensure the continuous supply of fresh drinking water in Aberdeen. Our work in this area included both the technical design and also the assets needed for a modular propping system. And as we move towards AMP8 with its significant increase in funding, we see opportunities across the group, and like in rail, we expect our divisions to be increasingly working together on major projects. So moving on to construction, where market conditions were more varied. And we categorize construction as general and specialist. In general construction, conditions have continued to be tough, largely caused by wider economic headwinds. Our activities in this area relate to the hire of small plant tools and equipment over a broad customer base. And from a divisional perspective, this mainly relates to our Brandon Hire Station division.
In the first half of the year, we've seen a reduction in revenue compared with half one of 2024. And in Brandon Hire Station, improvements in business performance have been slower than anticipated. But despite this, we're optimistic that things are moving in the right direction and the actions that we have taken position as well to take advantage of the market recovery when it comes. And as a reminder, this is a business that's very cyclical. The actions that are being undertaken in Brandon Hire Station relate to back to basics and focus, essentially ensuring that we have the optimal physical footprint and that we're focusing our efforts on customers that fit in our sweet spot. We're also making control and process improvements helped by data and system enhancements, which is part of our ongoing digital roadmap.
And alongside this, as I already mentioned when I spoke about our operating model, we are moving certain activities such as rehire and the management of strategic customers from Brandon Hire Station into the group centre. And this will better support the wider group, and it will also allow Brandon Hire Station to concentrate on its core business and its recovery plan. And as a result of these changes, as Keith mentioned, we will expect some exceptional items in the second half of the year. Within specialist construction, the position is more positive with good levels of activity in areas such as refurbishment and fit-outs. In specialist construction, our offering is typically more focused, and we either have niche specialist products or we are in very specialist end markets. And in this area, we've seen year-on-year growth, particularly in redevelopment projects.
It's worth mentioning that the recently acquired CPH business is also within specialist construction, serving the clean room, pharma, and data center market. The other point to briefly mention on construction is the continuing challenging credit conditions. As Keith mentioned, we're pleased that our debt write-off in the period improved on last year and our DSO is well controlled, but we have felt the impact both directly and also indirectly of some of the administrations in the sector. I'm now going to run through a case study of one of the major redevelopment projects that we have been working on, so this case study showcases some of the work that our MEP division is doing in office redevelopment. The Canary Wharf project is one of the biggest refits in Europe with over 1,000 contractors on site.
Our work here is all around access, providing safe, innovative, and environmentally friendly solutions. We've got over 500 assets on hire at this location, and we provide access to our entire fleet through our dedicated on-site hire center. We expect refits and office refurbishments to continue to be an area of growth for the group. Moving on to house building, where we supply telehandlers alongside small plant and equipment. Conditions remain challenging in this end market with a contraction expected, a contraction in output expected in 2024. We note the government's focus on house building, including targets and measures around planning reform, but we're yet to see any improvement in our activity level. The focus of the team within our UK Forks business has been ensuring tight cost control.
So moving on to energy, within this end market, the majority of our activities relate to oil and gas, and conditions continue to be favorable led by strong oil prices. We do note the shift to cleaner fuels and our own environmental roadmap, but we expect a continued high demand for oil over the short and medium term. In energy, we support a number of upstream and downstream projects, both in the UK and also overseas. And in the first half of the year, performance has been strong with a good level of growth. And that was supported by our work on a number of industrial shutdown projects. And I'll now work through a quick case study on energy. This case study is another example where our divisions have worked together on a major project. Five of our divisions have supported a major industrial shutdown with an on-site facility.
This project was 24/7 and included day-to-day operation and maintenance activities. And we've used this model of bringing together our capabilities on other U.K. industrial shutdown projects. That's the end of our operating review. I think we have significant market opportunity. And alongside the self-help measures that I've spoken about, we're well positioned for the future. So moving on to the summary and outlook. In summary, we've reported a robust first half performance despite some of the challenges that I've spoken about in some of our end markets. We're continuing to progress our strategy, including improving divisional collaboration and end sector focus, refreshing the operating model to take advantage of some of the self-help opportunities that we have, and also progressing our M&A strategy through the purchase of CPH in early October. We have a strong track record of navigating difficult markets, and we have confidence in the future.
That's despite some of the headwinds, including cost increases that were set out in the government autumn budget. Overall, we expect full year performance to be in line with market expectations. That concludes the presentation, and we will now take any questions that you may have.
Thank you both very much. Very comprehensive and helpful review. Lots and lots of questions, so we shall just dive in. A neat follow-on, Anna, for you there. Apparently, there has been a U.K. budget quite recently. We have a question. Early days, but have you seen any change in activity or inquiries since then? Because, of course, there was a lot of speculation beforehand and whether you like the outcome on that or not, whether we now have a bit more certainty.
Yeah, I mean, I think on the budget, there were certainly some positives from our perspective in terms of the focus on growth and the focus on infrastructure, and I think I mentioned in rail in particular, we were pleased that there was no change in the major projects that are being progressed in that area, so that was a big progress for us. I think the economy is still challenging, and I think that much-needed feel-good factor that will really get our construction businesses moving forward, particularly general construction, isn't quite happening yet. I think we're all waiting for the growth to happen. I think we initially hoped that would happen in the summer with the government change. I think that was then delayed until the autumn budget, and I still think we're not seeing it yet. I think we're on the cusp of it, but not quite there.
So lots of positives around the growth agenda and the focus on infrastructure. Obviously, like all businesses with a good number of people, we're impacted by some of the headwinds. And Keith, maybe you just want to mention the impact of National Insurance and National Minimum Wage and some of the things that we're thinking about in terms of how we can mitigate that.
That kicks off another question, as you won't be surprised to hear, Keith.
Unmitigated and just complying with the changes to National Insurance and National Minimum Wage will cost us around about GBP 4 million. In terms of mitigations, our pricing contracts are not set up so that we can just pass on increases in costs. We are going to have to work hard to mitigate where we can. It will predominantly be looking at where we can pass those on through price increases. Our working assumption at the minute is around about 50% that we might be able to mitigate, but we are looking at pricing very, very closely at the minute.
Yeah, very sensible. A couple of questions about CPH. Is there any significance in the fact that your first acquisition of the current management team has been made outside of the UK? Does that signal a broader strategy to add scale in your international businesses?
I think the attraction of CPH was it fit right in our sweet spot of being specialists, and I have to say that Ireland wasn't necessarily particularly on my radar, but the more we found out about the dynamics of the Irish market, the more things appealed, particularly the fact that level of optimism in construction over there is quite different, and there are a number of different market dynamics caused by tax regime there, the investment in things like data centers, etc., that made that very attractive for us.
I think the M&A strategy overall, from my perspective, would be looking for gaps in the U.K. market where we potentially do not have a presence that complement what we do, or looking in adjacent markets that are within our risk appetite where we can do things that we already do, and specialist access is something we already do in a market we're not currently in. So my focus is principally on areas that will be U.K. or U.K. adjacent market. But I think it's very important that anything we do do in M&A is disciplined, it's within our risk appetite, and it is in our current financial gearing of around 1.5 to moving towards 2 for the right opportunity.
Thank you. Very clear. Probably one for you, Keith. You've covered National Insurance. Thank you very much. With an additional question, do you have any comments on the inflationary environment regarding other costs in terms of perhaps replacement equipment or higher rates?
I think most UK businesses are going to be in a similar position to us with National Insurance and minimum wage changes. So I would expect pricing pressures across kind of our UK suppliers. We are not exclusively UK supply. We do buy equipment from overseas. So I'm expecting some pressure. It will differ from supplier to supplier based on where their supply chains are.
Thank you. Digital roadmap. Can you say a little bit more about how you feel progress is going and what comes next in the next, say, year or two?
Yeah. Our digital roadmap is pragmatic, and our spending, I think, is relatively modest compared to what you can spend on IT transformations. I think the focus for us is around getting the basics right and getting the best out of the systems that we already have, and where we do have systems, trying to align them to ensure we get the most out of them. Divisional collaboration is a really key theme for our business, and therefore ensuring that our business, that our individual systems are all well connected and speak to one another is fundamental to that. I think one of the next parts of the digital roadmap that I'm looking forward to getting in place is our CPQ configure price quote tool, which we think will help drive better disciplines around pricing.
And I think, as Keith mentioned, getting our pricing positioning right is going to be very important as we look to offset some of those challenges around cost increases. Other areas of priority are around data and ensuring we've got the right data to make the right decisions in the business and ensuring we improve the quality of things that we've got going on in that direction. So they're the main priorities. It is a pragmatic approach to it. It's not about spending vast amounts of money. It's getting the investments that we are making working harder for us. As you might have seen from our financial statements, our admin costs are up ever so slightly year on year. An element of that is the investment we are making in IT, which is typically going through our underlying numbers at the moment.
Right. Now, a couple of questions around VP Rail. Is it too early, or have you got financial objectives that you would be expecting to see the new unit generate and enhance performance over the next two, three years?
Yeah. I think it's too early to share numbers at this stage, but certainly as part of our upcoming budget process, we'll be modelling that and looking at how we best take advantage of the significant commitments out there with CP7 and other projects. What I do know is that in the conversations we've been having with both the external market and also with our divisions internally, there's a lot of optimism about what this can bring us. I think from an internal perspective, it means that all of our special rail capabilities are being given a showcase out in the external market from one person, and then from our customers, they can speak to Carl and Carl's team and get access to everything that's happening within VP, and also, we as a business will be easier to do business with on rail because that will all be coordinated centrally.
It's too early to give specific numbers, but we expect continued growth in rail, and we'll be looking at targets, etc., as part of our budget cycle.
A logical extension, and that does embody a lot of the strategic highlights that you put into the business. Whilst, again, it's a little bit of a test run, are there other sectors in which you are active and focused where this combined solution could be brought into practice going forward?
Yeah. I mean, rail was an obvious first choice for us because I think in Carl, we already had the ideal person internally within our business. So that's our sort of first test to see how things work. I think we'll see how that goes. If that goes well, then I think it would be natural to assume we would look at other areas, and I think another area that you might want to look at would be probably water, particularly given AMP 8 is 70% more spend than AMP 7. We do a lot of work in AMP 8, and would there be advantages for us to do that in a more coordinated way, perhaps, so it is something that we are currently looking at, but at the moment, all efforts are on Carl and the new VP Rail team establishing that function.
Good. Now, a more strategic question. We have one here. How is the board thinking about capital allocation over the medium term, let's say three to five years, and how that might be split between organic investments, more M&A, and, of course, total shareholder returns because you do have this fantastic three-decade record of dividend reliability?
Yeah. We do have a stated capital allocation policy, and if you have a look at the full slide deck that's on our website, there are appendices in there which just detail the full capital allocation policy. I think as a newish leadership team, we have lots of thoughts and lots of ideas of where we can use capital to drive growth. I think, as Keith mentioned, number one would be organic growth through CapEx. Number two would be M&A. I won't give the order here, but in terms of priorities, you've got organic growth, you've got M&A. Obviously, the dividend track record is very important to us, but we do look at other areas where cash can be returned to shareholders through special dividend share buybacks, and they continue to be tools that would be available to us at the right time.
As a Board, we keep that under review periodically.
Thank you. A couple of questions about Brandon Hire Station. Can you talk a little bit more about your plans? How is the business looking at the moment, specifically in the number of branches? And putting that all together, when do you hope to see profitability from that sector?
Yeah. I'm very happy with the work that the team are doing in that area. I think we're doing all of the right steps, and the business is moving forward in the right way. The challenge has been that slower improvement in general economic sentiment. That's what really gets the general construction market powering. If I look at the main thing we're trying to do with Brandon Hire Station, it's around the focus on the core customers and the identity of that business. We did make some changes to the physical footprint in the last financial year, and we obviously continue to keep that under review to ensure that we've got the right balance of cost base versus geographic spread and access to our services.
In the future, I would probably say that Brandon Hire Station is a slightly smaller business, but generating more profit once it's got down to that absolute core focus on who is the sweet spot customer, typically around sort of regional tool hire, and what does the business need to do to take best advantage of that market. We are happy that the business is moving forward in the right direction, but we just need that help from the external market to really power that to come through to the business performance.
Yeah. Everybody needs help from external markets. When will it come is the challenging question, which is indeed our next question. I think you might have already covered this in terms of assessing the post-budget environment, but any house building, any signs of green shoots? It does seem that planning permissions have become dramatically easier to get since the election. But is that feeding through to demand that can give you signs of hope for the second half or after that?
Yeah. I mean, we're certainly encouraged by the targets that have been set, and we're certainly being encouraged by the changes in planning reform that will make things be a bit easier. There's a question about whether or not those challenging targets are achievable, but certainly, we expect to see momentum pick up. There is a bit of a lag in our business in terms of the statements being made, the groundwork being completed to when we're getting our telehandlers out on site. But we do think things will improve, but I think for us, it will certainly be into the next financial year before we see a meaningful uptick in activity levels.
Great. I think we're on to the last one. Again, imperial ambitions. You're clearly benefiting from the shift in the German transmission business towards renewable energy. Do you have any particular thoughts about continental Europe and how that might grow in importance to the group? And if you do have those thoughts, whether M&A would be a logical route to accelerate that expansion?
Yeah. I mean, I think, as I mentioned, on M&A, I'm sort of U.K. plus, so if we can do something in the U.K., that would be my preference because it's lower risk, it's known markets, it's known laws and regulations, but we are seeing the benefit of being in mainland Europe, particularly at the moment within the transmission sector in Germany, so certainly not saying no to expansion into Europe, but I would rather look at the lower risk opportunities available to us first before we go into markets that we're not as familiar with, but as you've seen by the acquisition we made in October in Ireland, we're not afraid to do things out of mainland U.K., but we want to do those in a measured, disciplined, risk-appropriate fashion.
Sensible note on which to finish. So can I thank our audience for their attention and very interesting range of questions? A little bit of a request back to you. You will get a feedback form, and the company are very interested to hear your thoughts about what they're doing and indeed this presentation, which, as a reminder, has been recorded, so that should be available publicly quite soon. And for those of you interested in looking forward, the company can't make too many forecasts, but there is, as always, an excellent piece of research from James Tetley on the Equity Development website covering the results. And I believe he has a fair value, nice round number of £10 share for the business, given its long quality record. So our final thanks go to Keith and to Anna. Thank you very much, and we wish you continued success going forward.
Thank you.