Engineer owed £600,000 by Carillion faces administration

Vaughan Engineering, part of a major mechanical and electrical services company, is facing administration after the collapse of Carillion.

A total of 160 people employed across Vaughan Engineering’s operations in Great Britain, which has bases in Edinburgh, Warrington and Newcastle, now face redundancy.

The Northern Ireland-based part of the Vaughan Engineering business – which is a separate company and not reliant on Carillion contracts – continues to trade with a three-year forward order book worth more than £40m.

Meanwhile, Brankin, a ventilation ductwork contractor operating throughout the UK, which is also part of the Vaughan Group, continues to trade unaffected.

Vaughan Engineering’s operation in Great Britain was a principal subcontractor on several projects led by Carillion Construction.

Vaughan said it was owed more than £600,000 for works it has already completed for Carillion and, prior to the collapse, had been contracted for a further £1.1m in work for this quarter alone.

Among the projects it had been working on were VauxPlot1 in Sunderland, where Carillion had a contract worth over £1m with Siglion, a JV between Sunderland City Council and Carillion.

It had also been working for Carillion on the Heath School in Runcorn.

The school project was completed last December but Vaughan Engineering still hasn’t been paid more than £300,000 for work it carried out.

The company has continued to pay its workforce for the weeks since Carillion’s demise, despite the fact there has been no work and no payment from Carillion, its administrators, or local authorities and government organisations that had commissioned the various projects, Vaughan said.

Gavin Vaughan, finance director of the company, said in a statement: “This is devastating news for all of the people who work for Vaughan Engineering.

“We are a family-owned firm and started our GB business 50 years ago.

“It is a terrible blow not just for all of the individuals and their families but also for the economy.

“We have three sites in England and Scotland, employing 160 people and paying more than £6m annually in salaries and hundreds of thousands more in rates and to our many suppliers.

“I think sadly it is inevitable that several of those suppliers and their employees will also be seriously impacted.

“We have tried everything we can to save our business, despite approaches to Scottish Enterprise, the Scottish Government, MPs, local and national government authorities, no assistance has been forthcoming.

“Instead, we are facing situations where we are actually being asked to honour clauses in our contracts which would mean we would be responsible for several years for warrantying and maintenance of work which we carried out should any problems occur, yet we haven’t even been paid for these installations.

“It is especially painful for all of us involved in this to know that none of it is our fault.

“At Vaughan Engineering we have always taken great pride in what we do, just last week we won another two industry awards.

“We did the work we were commissioned to do, to our usual extremely high standard and as usual we completed it on time and to budget, yet this is the result.”