How over five years of working together - and a combined heritage spanning nearly half a century - became the North West's most complete flood risk and drainage service
There is a meaningful difference between firms that decide to partner and firms that formalise something that was already working. The partnership between Site Surveying Services and Thomas Consulting is firmly the latter. By the time the two firms announced their dedicated partnership, they had already spent more than five years working alongside each other on a wide range of instructions – learning how the other approached a project, trusting each other’s outputs and quietly building the foundation that every good professional partnership depends on.
This is the story of how that partnership came to be, what it has grown into, and where it is heading.
Two Firms, Two Histories, One Region.
The two firms first began working together over five years ago, and like many of the most enduring professional relationships in this industry, it started with a straightforward instruction delivered well.
The first joint project was at Royal Blackburn Hospital, where SSS carried out a series of topographic surveys across the site over a number of years on behalf of Thomas Consulting. It was the kind of instruction that establishes whether two firms are genuinely compatible – repeated visits to a live, complex environment, demanding accurate and consistent data each time, with Thomas Consulting depending on SSS to deliver without supervision or chasing. The surveys were completed to the standard needed, on programme, every time. From that foundation the relationship grew
From the outset, both firms found that the working relationship was straightforward in the best possible sense. Communication was direct. Programmes were met. Each firm took the other’s professional judgement seriously. When questions arose on site or in the data, they were resolved quickly, between people who understood each other’s discipline well enough to have a useful conversation.
Further instructions followed across a range of sectors and environments. At BAE Systems in Barrow – one of the UK’s most operationally complex and security-sensitive sites – SSS delivered survey work as part of a Thomas Consulting instruction, navigating the demanding access requirements and rigorous quality standards that major defence infrastructure demands.
At Heysham Power Station, SSS completed topographic and utility mapping surveys for Thomas Consulting in the energy and environmental sector – a technically exacting environment where accuracy and the careful management of underground services are non-negotiable.
To demonstrate the trust in this relationship, Thomas Consulting was appointed on a package of survey instructions across a series of sites in Merseyside, with SSS being the firm they turned to. Being trusted to deliver a multi-site package for a new client reflects the confidence the two firms have built with each other over years, the type of confidence only comes from consistent delivery
Five years of working together across some of the most demanding sites in the North West had produced two firms who understood each other’s workflows, trusted each other’s outputs and had no need to second-guess the other’s approach. The case for formalising that into a dedicated service was straightforward.
Seeing the Same Gap
The conversation about formalising a dedicated flood risk and drainage partnership grew directly from that working history. Both firms had independently observed the same problem in the market and recognised that together they were already well placed to solve it.
Flood risk has become one of the defining technical challenges of the current era in UK development, infrastructure and public sector asset management. Climate projections, increasing development pressure on constrained land and tightening national planning policy around flood zones mean that local authorities, developers and environmental agencies are managing more complex flood risk requirements than at any point in recent memory. The demand for technically rigorous, efficiently delivered flood risk assessments, drainage designs and hydraulic models is growing – and the market is not consistently meeting that demand.
Clients currently face a limited set of options, none of them without significant drawbacks. Large multidisciplinary consultancies offer breadth of service but carry substantial overheads that translate directly into premium fees – costs that many local authority and developer clients cannot justify for an instruction that a leaner, more specialist team could deliver with equal rigour. Self-coordinating teams of separate specialists place the programme management burden on the client, create accountability gaps at every discipline interface and introduce risk whenever one firm’s output doesn’t align with another’s assumptions. And firms that present as full-service providers but quietly subcontract their survey or engineering work introduce a quality gap that the client frequently doesn’t discover until it has already caused a problem.
Both Thomas Consulting and Site Surveying Services had observed these dynamics playing out with clients they knew well. The question both firms arrived at independently was the same one: given that we already work together, already trust each other’s outputs and already understand each other’s workflow – why are we not offering this as a single, fully coordinated service?
What to Expect
Every flood risk and drainage instruction we deliver together follows the same client experience – one point of contact, one coordinated programme, and a team that already knows how to work together before your project begins.
Desktop studies, existing data review and site appraisal give both firms a shared understanding of the site before anyone sets foot on it. Survey scope is agreed between SSS and Thomas Consulting at this stage – structured from the outset to give the engineering exactly what it needs.
The survey work is planned, mobilised and delivered by SSS’s own directly employed team. Data is processed and delivered in a form Thomas Consulting can work from immediately – no handover friction, no reformatting, no delay.
With survey data in hand, Thomas Consulting moves directly into modelling, design and assessment. Because the data was structured for this workflow from day one, the engineering stage runs at pace.
One team accountable for everything in between.
What Comes Next
The formalisation of this partnership marks a beginning:
Both firms are committed to building something that deepens over time. The more SSS and Thomas Consulting work as a coordinated team, the more naturally the survey and engineering workflows align, the better each firm understands the other’s constraints and priorities, and the more consistently the client experience improves. That kind of compounding quality is only available to firms with the patience to build a real partnership rather than a transactional arrangement – and it is what both SSS and Thomas Consulting are committed to.
The joint case study programme will document completed flood risk and drainage instructions as they are delivered – giving future clients concrete evidence of outcomes rather than promises. As the portfolio of completed work grows, so does the body of evidence that the partnership works in practice, not just in principle.
In the longer term, the ambition of both firms extends beyond flood risk and drainage alone. The working relationship between SSS and Thomas Consulting sits at the centre of a broader vision – a carefully selected group of specialist firms, each expert in their own discipline, each committed to the same principles of directly employed delivery and transparent accountability, working together across the full range of civil engineering and development instructions.
For now, the foundation is solid. Built over years of working together, tested across a wide range of instructions and grounded in the kind of mutual trust that cannot be manufactured – the SSS and Thomas Consulting partnership is ready.
