Founded in 1984, and listed on AIM in late 2016, Van Elle has grown to become the UK’s largest and most diverse ground engineering contractor. The Group offers a wide range of specialist geotechnical techniques and services to customers in a variety of construction end markets.
Over the company’s history, we have created a strong reputation across our markets built on service quality, technical expertise, innovation, safety and successful delivery for our customers.
We operate from a central base at Kirkby in Ashfield in Nottinghamshire where our offices, training centre, pre-cast factories and plant and transport operations are all based.
Principal Activities
Van Elle’s end-to-end solutions encompass ground investigation, general and specialist piling, rail engineering services, modular foundations and ground improvement and stabilisation services in a wide range of environments.
The Group reports through three primary segments:
- General Piling delivers our larger rotary bored, CFA and driven piling solutions to customers in a broad range of end markets, operating principally on open site construction projects
- Specialist Piling provides ground engineering solutions in environments with access and operational constraints which require the use of specialist piling rigs and techniques, including ground stabilisation techniques and an extensive on-track rail capability
- Ground Engineering Services comprises our housing activities including our piling and Smartfoot modular foundation systems and our geotechnical and testing services operating through the independent Strata Geotechnics brand
Strategic Markets
The Group is focussed on three core, UK market sectors to which it offers a full range of integrated ground engineering services; deploying an unrivalled range of rigs and expertise on both a regional and national basis:
- Residential; private and social housebuilders and larger residential developers
- Infrastructure; rail, highways, power & energy and water, flooding & coastal
- Regional Construction; public and private construction programmes and regional developments
Customers
The Group maintains a diverse and wide customer base, reflective of the breadth of services offered across our core sectors; typically delivering 1000 plus projects a year. As a specialist subcontractor, our customers are typically tier 1 contractors, developers and housebuilders. We are also experienced operating as Principal Contractor and in Rail hold a PC licence.
Our aim is to provide an exemplary, high quality service and retain our customers long term. By offering a fully integrated capability across all techniques, supported by a safety first and collaborative attitude, we aim to become the trusted ground engineering partner of choice for our customers.
Stakeholders
The Group is in conscious of its responsibilities to maintain a sustainable, ethical and caring approach to business. We strive to embed this in our business culture and we regularly check on our progress through a stakeholder management plan. We identify our key stakeholders as follows:
- Employees; ensuring we attract, develop and retain our employees through fair remuneration and incentivisation, engagement and communication programmes, career development and training opportunities and maintaining a rolling target of 5% of our workforce as apprentices and trainees
- Customers; supporting our customers with early solutions, collaborating and responding to their needs, seeking to deliver right first time every time and acting on feedback to ensure we continuously improve
- Shareholders; transparent reporting of progress, proactive investor relations and an open and accessible management team across both retail and institutional shareholders
- The communities in which we operate; respectful of the impact of our operations on our neighbours; we operate under the considerate constructors programme and undertake a range of community projects both out in the filed and at our home location of Kirkby in Ashfield
Our Values
Our values reflect our family company roots and our continued commitment to operate as a straightforward, easy to deal with business, with a directly employed workforce and can-do attitude:
- SAFETY – always put health and safety first
- INTEGRITY – open, honest and straightforward; delivering on our promises
- TEAMWORK – a ‘can-do’ approach, working together to exceed customer expectations
- EXCELLENCE – keen to impress our customers, always do a great job and keep improving what we do