Profile: Julie Fawcett

WHEN Julie Fawcett left college at 18 she was told she had three choices – to work in nursing, policing or hairdressing.

That is her one recollection of careers advice at the time – the 1980s – and though it has improved “in pockets” since then, she said, there is still a long way to go.

Mrs Fawcett, who became national chairman of the Association of Women in Property earlier this year, said: “The careers advice in schools is still shockingly, shockingly bad.

“We go into schools and the girls just go, ‘well I don’t want to work on a building site in a hard hat and steel toe-capped boots’. But it’s not like that.

“They don’t have a clue. They might know about architecture but they certainly don’t know about quantity surveying, planning consultants, it’s really, really poor.”

But the Association of Women in Property has set out to change girls’ attitudes towards the construction and property sectors by sending women who have successful careers in the industry into schools.

Mrs Fawcett said: “The girls that tend to come into the industry tend to have some family connection with the industry so they know a bit more about it than a girl who doesn’t have any family who work in the sector.

“It’s a bit of a sweeping statement but that’s generally what happens.”

The Association of Women in Property also supports women in the sector who want to secure boardroom positions.

Women represent only 15 per cent of the property and construction industry workforce in the UK, according to the association, which has 1,000 members with around 70 of those based in Yorkshire and the North East.

Mrs Fawcett also calls for businesses to make it easier for women to stay in the industry once they have had children.

“The women that come into the industry, you get that point in their lives where they may go off and have children and it’s not always geared up for flexibility for those women coming back into the industry. So the ones we’ve managed to attract, do we manage to retain them? Possibly not.”

She said that many organisations “talk the talk” when it comes to flexible working, but added that the actual implementation is “still possibly a bit questionable”.

“I think a lot of the companies, certainly a lot of the big corporates, they have the policies in place for flexible working, job sharing etc, but it’s making it that little bit easier to actually organise.”

Mrs Fawcett said that property and construction is seen as “a stereotypical male industry” but said that she has not found this to be the case.

“For example, FM (facilities management), okay there’s a hard engineering side, but a lot of it is around managing people, which again women are very, very good at, so why shouldn’t you apply those skills in a property-related environment? What should stop you?”

And she is talking from experience. Today, she is head of FM North on the outsourced Lloyds Banking contract for Mitie, a business headed by the UK’s first female, Asian FTSE 250 CEO, Ruby McGregor-Smith.

The Lloyds contract, which started in August, is Mitie’s biggest ever and sees more than 7,000 Mitie staff working at over 3,000 of the bank’s locations.

Mitie Group, which has a wide range of outsourcing services spanning cleaning to security, reported 5.6 per cent revenue growth to £1.03bn in the six months to the end of September 2012, with the expectation that it would benefit in its second half from the deal with Lloyds and its recent purchase of home care business Enara.

But Mitie said pre-tax profits slid almost 13 per cent to £37.7m after charging for amortisation, acquisitions and restructuring.

Mrs Fawcett was previously head of retail FM at Lloyds Banking Group but transferred across to Mitie, which she described as “a new challenge”. She is certainly no stranger to corporate shake-ups.

When Mrs Fawcett was in her role as head of retail FM at Halifax Bank of Scotland it was taken over by Lloyds Banking Group in a Government-arranged takeover.

HBOS had buckled under the weight of its debt at the start of 2009 and taxpayers were forced to bail it out.

On taking on the role at Lloyds, Mrs Fawcett went from being responsible for 1,000 branches to 3,000 overnight.

Prior to this, she had spent many years with the former Halifax Building Society, which became Halifax plc in 1997, going into project management before it became HBOS in 2001 in a merger with the Bank of Scotland.

Mrs Fawcett recalled: “On the high street we had Halifax branches, Bank of Scotland branches, we had to combine the two.

“So I actually project-managed the Halifax Bank of Scotland branch re-sign project nationally (which involved replacing signage). As you can imagine that was a major piece of work.”

Mrs Fawcett said she “loves” her job, but only ended up in the property sector after spotting an advert in the Yorkshire Post for a property assistant at Halifax Building Society in the mid-1980s.

“I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do. I actually fell into the world of property because it sounded like an interesting job,” she recalled.

Mrs Fawcett, who had studied business at college, is hoping to ensure girls are better informed than she was about the world of property and construction when making career choices. But the industry has faced a tumultuous few years since the financial crisis and, against this backdrop, attracting people to the sector is a challenge.

The UK’s construction output slid seven per cent in February on a year ago, recent figures show.

While the sector grew by 5.5 per cent when compared with the result in snow-bound January, the performance of firms was still down 16 per cent on a quarter-on-quarter basis, the Office for National Statistics said.

Construction, which accounts for just under seven per cent of GDP, has contracted by 16.5 per cent when comparing the last quarter of 2012 with the first quarter of 2008.

Mrs Fawcett said: “It is difficult because there’s not that volume of projects coming through either. It isn’t easy.

“But what I would say is if a particular career interests you and you want to apply yourself, yes it will be a struggle at the moment, but I’d encourage them not to see it as a barrier as that whole cycle will change.”

She said there are “green shoots out there”, and welcomed the recent opening of the Trinity Leeds development in the city as well as the construction of the Leeds Arena.

Julie Fawcett Factfile

Title: Head of facilities management North on the Lloyds Banking contract for Mitie.

Date of birth: 25/03/ 1968.

Born: Leeds.

Lives: Harden, Bingley.

Education: MBA with the Open University, completed in 2008.

First job: Property assistant at the former Halifax Building Society.

Car driven: Audi A5.

Favourite film: Casino Royale.

Favourite musician: Paul Weller.

Favourite holiday destination: The Maldives.

Most proud of: Getting my scuba diving qualification.