Southern Water’s new engineering team hit the ground running on April 1 for the start of AMP6 - the in-house team will deliver projects that would have been almost entirely outsourced under AMP5.

Representing a new way of working for the company, the team will be responsible for designing capital projects such as new water supply and wastewater treatment works, to be built between 2015 and 20, in line with the company’s £3 billion business plan.

Procedures and management systems are in place and 120 staff, including engineers of all disciplines, are already delivering - about 90 AMP6 projects are live.

Southern Water’s Chief Engineer Ian Kirkaldy, who was tasked with creating the team after joining the company in 2014, said:

“The capacity and capability of the team is ramping up. We are starting to deliver and deliver well. Staff wise, we’ve got a talented team. We also have processes and tools in place and we’re starting to hit our first targets. The next step is to buy new IT design tools for things like 3D modelling and this will happen around May.”

The team, which also includes engineers from AMP6 strategic solutions partner MWH, is based in Southern Water’s Brighton office.

Ian Kirkaldy continued:

“Rebuilding an in-house team has great benefits - we have greater control and will be making the key decisions on projects. It also allows us to have better conversations with the rest of the business and fine-tune solutions in ways that we couldn’t in the past. We have the ingredients for something great.”

Recruitment to the team is continuing throughout 2015/16 with the aim of having 200 people in place by April 2016. Engineering professionals across the board are being sourced with recruiters looking both at home and abroad.

According to Kirkaldy, recruiting engineers into the South Coast has never been easy, which is why the firm is now widening the net to parts of Europe. In particular, Southern Water is now looking for senior staff with higher level skills and qualifications to lead the teams