FAMILY JEWELS Find out more about Ainscough Hire and Ainscough Metals at www.ainscoughhire.co.uk and www.ainscoughmetals.co.uk


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Ainscough Hire - Profile


A welfare cabin awaits refurbishment.


to the 2012 London Olympic Games. However, our main customers are in construction, housebuilding and utilities, with a number of walk-in clients working on smaller domestic projects.”


Back to the main fleet, and refitting, repainting and reusing what are basically big metal boxes seems like a very sensible idea, particularly while lead times aren't shrinking quickly enough and raw materials remain in such short supply. Is this a deliberately green policy? Sam enters the room and picks up the question.


“Charlotte has done a lot to develop the business over the last five years, but our big thing is recycling and sustainability. We’ve bought cabins from Hinkley Point and other projects where equipment has been decommissioned, such as offshore windfarms – we recently bought 40


Ainscough Hire has its own crane trucks.


containers that were used to ferry all the kit out. We tend to buy nationwide and in large quantities, rather than ones and twos, and we probably sell as many cabins as we hire.


“We try to salvage and save as much as we can – particularly on the metals side – so we’re already very carbon-negative. However, we’re also doing a lot of r & d on carbon reduction across both businesses.”


The cabins business continues to boom, the company doing well through the lockdown when it was supplying to hospitals and socially-distanced jobsites. Elsewhere, we’re seeing cabins with additional eco benefits like solar panels, lithium battery backups, hydrogen fuel cells and such. Are you seeing much demand from customers for that sort of thing?


“There isn’t much demand at the moment.


Another cabin, post-refurb - good as new!


However, our cabins are probably greener than most other eco cabins, due to the fact that a lot of them are now on their third or fourth refurbishments,” explains Sam.


“Those things are good for inner city works or sensitive jobsites, but many of our customers are smaller construction firms. So it’s also about having the sort of clientele who can afford that sort of thing,” adds Charlotte.


So what’s going to be the focus of your investment, moving forward?


It’s just going to be welfare cabins, site accommodations and storage containers, really, but we’ll continue to meet our customers’ demands,” says Charlotte, unapologetically.


There’s absolutely nothing wrong with playing to your strengths, of course. On a personal note, then – Sam has had over 25 years to develop the hire and the metals business, but what are Charlotte’s plans or ambitions for the next 25?


“Ooh, that’s a difficult question, but we must be doing something right because we get so many happy customers and a lot of repeat business. I don’t have any plans to rival the nationals, as we’re already busy enough in the north-west. So my ambition is to keep on doing what we’re doing, and doing it well.”


And amen to that, eh! My thanks in the meantime to Charlotte and Sam for theirs. And what a pleasure to discover a quite different arm to the Ainscough empire, but one that is modelled on the same hardworking principles, but still a family company at heart. n


Ainscough's container fleet provides secure storage for its customers.


September 2022 - Executive Hire News 39


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