NCP Services

NCP Services is the UK market leader in the provision of traffic enforcement and transport management services to local authorities. The company was formed as a division of NCP Group (the car parking business) in 2000.

3i acquired NCP in 2005 for £555m. In March 2007, following the de-merger of NCP into two separate businesses and the sale of the car parking business to Macquarie; 3i were left with the fast evolving outsourcing division, NCP Services. The business employs more than 4000 people working for over 90 local authorities providing a range of services including enforcement (such as the provision of parking attendants and clamping), to bailiff services, notice processing congestion charge management and consultancy services.

In early 2008 Skillcapital was asked to search for a new CEO for the business. The key challenges for the new CEO were to drive top and bottom line growth; identify new business lines that could be offered to the existing customer base (mainly local government); broaden the customer base by expanding NCP Services into adjacent areas of local/central government outsourcing.  NCP Services had recently won a contract to run Abu Dhabi’s new parking management programme so experience of expanding a business into new geographies was also relevant.

The CEO would need to have experience of providing strategic leadership to an outsourced services provider; where the work is of a predominantly contractual nature; and within the public sector (so TUPE transfer of staff is common) as well as where there are large blue-collar workforces present. The right candidate would also need to demonstrate the successful diversifying of products and services into a client.

Mark Underwood joined NCP services as CEO in early July 2008.  Mark had previously run the BPO division of the private equity backed Astron business which provided highly complex IT enabled BPO solutions to many of the UK’s major companies, local authorities and Central Government.

Following Astron, Mark had run Reliance’s Secure Task Management business which delivered a range of blue collar services to major public sector bodies such as the Police and the Prison Service and most recently was the International Services President at Geo. Geo runs detention and correctional institutions and prisoner escort services. 

Throughout his last ten years (some of which have been under private equity ownership) Mark has provided a range of blue and white collar outsourced services to local and central government and international markets.

List of all case studies