EY reveals major growth for Newcastle and London following heavy investment

EY, a professional services firm providing assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services, has reported UK fee income growth of 2.7 per cent to £2.41bn for the year ending June 30, 2018.

This is up from £2.35bn in the previous year, with a five-year compound annual growth rate of seven per cent.

Tax grew by 7.3 per cent; advisory grew by 3.8 per cent; and transaction advisory services were up by 1.5 per cent.

Assurance fell slightly by 1.7 per cent whilst audit grew by four per cent. Financial services, the UK’s largest sector, grew by more than seven per cent this year.

Distributable profits before tax increased by 1.7 per cent from £464m in 2017 to £472m in 2018.

EY also continued its expansion outside of London with 42 per cent of all new hires in offices outside of London.

Meanwhile, EY’s Newcastle practice grew two per cent to around 580 people during a financial year which saw a number of strategic senior hires.

EY has also set up a new global trade team in the North, with the appointment of Onelia Angelosanto as director of the team, in response to growing demand for support and advice from businesses involved in international trade.

Sandra Thompson, Newcastle’s managing partner, said: “EY is a people business and I am acutely aware that our results and strong performance in the marketplace are down to the exceptional talent we have here.

“Newcastle is already EY’s third largest office location in the regions but we have more growth planned. EY sees a large part of its future growth coming from the regions and that’s why we are investing in our regional teams across all levels.

“From a business perspective, the fact that burgeoning numbers of innovative startup tech businesses like Gamevy are choosing to base themselves here really proves that Newcastle and the wider region has an increasingly compelling business story to tell.”

The Newcastle practice took on 17 graduates during the year, an 89 per cent increase on the previous year, and it almost tripled the number of apprentices on EY’s Business Apprenticeship programme, giving 23 young people an alternative to university.

During the year, EY also opened applications for a new Degree Apprenticeship in Newcastle, in collaboration with Northumbria University.

Sandra Thompson added: “We benefit from having a pool of outstanding graduates to choose from in this region but apprenticeships are a vital alternative to the standard route into further education - they provide the students with practical and theoretical experience whilst also paying a salary.

“From EY’s perspective, we believe apprentices are key to our business, they help to drive creative thinking and bring us into the future of work.”

EY employs more than 14,500 people across 23 offices in the UK, and a network of 150 countries and 260,000 people around the world.

This investment helps EY to serve 23,000 UK clients, both large and small, supporting economic growth across the country and helping to deliver on our purpose of building a better working world.

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