Practical economics

Making the world predictable to enable you to make better business decisions.

In today’s uncertain world, you need the right specialist expertise to improve your planning and forecasting to make better business decisions and grow your business.

We work across regulated utilities, the commercial and public sectors, providing unique solutions to complex problems to give you a strategic view of the future from a holistic perspective.

Economics is best practiced in tandem with other specialisms: our economics team combine their expertise with our in-house cost professionals, engineers, asset managers, environmental scientists, working together to develop the optimal package of solutions.

Our team blends experienced economic leaders with specialist advisors and enthusiastic graduates to offer the right combination of expertise across many policy areas.

We tailor our approach and solution to your needs: we can take your unique data and overlay it with external datasets to develop independent research; deliver technical reports; present board, event or media presentations; provide data visualisations; create statistical models or training programmes to help you to be better prepared for change.

  • Our people understand the external drivers of change, as well as deep knowledge of regulatory frameworks and legislation to know how to respond efficiently and intelligently.
  • We combine our economics expertise with our other in-house specialists to ensure the advice we give is holistic.
  • We combine strategic ESG knowledge and a six-capitals approach to ensure our advice reflects the critical need to decarbonise and adapt to the climate emergency.
  • Our people’s diversity and our wide experience base across many markets allows us to see things with multiple lenses to provide the right solution for your needs.

How we can help

  • Strategic economics: Tailored strategic services to help you make decisions and grow your business.
  • Macroeconomic horizon scanning and strategic risk optimisation: Helping you make better long-term strategic decisions by identifying trends and risks and embedding your ESG objectives.
  • Economic forecasts: Helping you plan for the future of your business through macroeconomic forecasts tailored to your markets.
  • Business planning and strategy: Economic advice for setting commercial business plans, market assessments, and mergers & acquisitions.
  • Economic regulation: Expert knowledge on the economic framework for regulated companies in the water and energy markets.
  • Price reviews: Efficiency benchmarking, outcomes design, cost-benefit analysis, and finance ability assessment to give you the best possible price result based on your objectives.
  • Regulatory strategy: Strategic advice on regulatory frameworks to position your business optimally.
  • Charging and level playing field  advice: Ensure you are compliant with legislation and balancing competing charging objectives through charging advice, tariff structure design, and level playing field advice where competition law risks exist.
  • Enhanced asset management and commercial services: Providing a different lens to take your asset management and commercial services to the next level.
  • Asset management: Enhancing your cost-benefit analysis and optimising your investment portfolio through economic expertise for your asset management activities.
  • Commercial and cost management: Adding economic knowledge to your cost management, from proving cost vs performance, to measuring real price effects, and improved cost benchmarking.
  • Environmental valuation: Valuing the natural environment for decision making, quantifying the externalities of different activities for investment optimisation, and evaluating nature-based solutions.

Here to solve your biggest challenges and grow sustainable value

Our expert consultants are available to broaden your thinking, lead transformation, and help you achieve successful outcomes.

Contact our experts