12 pieces on the UK economics consultancy industry. 90 firms in the curated universe; the latest disclosed turnover rows in the working database sum to £2.48bn across 30 firms. 25 years of filings and source notes.
There are roughly 90 economics-consultancy firms in the United Kingdom. The public directory gives 80 of them a direct Companies House number; the working database also carries registered, parent and brand rows for analytical continuity. Across the latest turnover disclosures in that database, 30 firms sum to £2.48bn in the latest filed year (FX-adjusted) — an observed floor; Cebr’s 2018 extrapolation puts the upper bound near £3.6bn. They advise competition authorities, price regulators, government departments, law firms, and corporate clients on the most consequential economic decisions in Britain, CMA merger clearances, Ofwat and Ofgem price reviews, CAT damages awards, Treasury fiscal policy. Much of their work happens behind closed doors. Very little of it is written about.
This series traces the industry's history from 2000 to 2025. It is built on filed Companies House accounts and source rows for the active firms in the dataset, where separate accounts exist, plus 25 years of Global Competition Review coverage, press cuttings, obituaries, and firm histories. The dataset, the code, and the source PDFs are open, and the review workflow maps quantitative, dated, people, deal and source-dependent claims to named sources that a reader can check. Interpretation is labelled as interpretation. Start anywhere.
8 charts, one market. The shape of UK economics consulting in 2025, £2.48bn of disclosed revenue (floor), 90 firms, one 56-per-cent profit margin at the top.
Three interactive maps and one force-directed graph. Begin in Britain; then step back for the world. A ~90-firm dataset, ~80 pinned to postcodes, wired to a single filter panel.
An interactive explorer for all 90 firms. Filter by segment and structure, switch between staff, turnover, margin and top-earner pay, toggle firms in and out, and watch the chart and totals recompute live.
The year the UK economics-consultancy market did not yet exist in its modern shape. A portrait of the four firms, 15 people, and three cases that seeded the industry.
In January 2000, NERA was a central incumbent in the UK economics market; by 2010, three defectors had built a rival that would eventually post the highest profit-per-partner visible in this project's detailed-account LLP sample.
LECG imploded, its European economists scattered across three doors, and a patient English private equity house backed a macro-research boutique at a reported four-times-revenue valuation. The money had begun to arrive.
US-owned advisory groups expand in London; the project file's earliest private-equity cheque into UK economics research appears; Brexit throws off a regulatory advisory boom; and one firm quietly posts the highest profit-per-partner visible in this project's detailed-account LLP sample.
An 18-partner competition-economics firm on a single floor of 199 Bishopsgate booked the highest profit-per-partner visible in this project's detailed-account LLP sample. McKinsey, Jacobs, and Econic show three different buyer or financing routes: acqui-hire, full strategic ownership, and funded breakaway.
Five senior economists walked out of the CMA in three years; Stefan Hunt appears at three institutions. Here is where they went, and which platforms hired or financed the moves.
A sourced chord diagram of 30-plus documented senior cross-firm moves in the UK economics consultancy market, 2000–2025. Who came from where. Who went where. The visible senior-move layer, not every career move in the market.
Three economists walked out of NERA London in April 2002 and set up a competition-economics boutique from scratch. 23 years later, the firm they built posts £108m of revenue and £3.34m per partner, the highest profit-per-partner visible in this project's detailed-account LLP sample.
Jonathan Orszag billed well over $1,000 an hour. FTI's Lexecon and COMPASS acquisitions built the platform he later left; Econic then launched as a financed breakaway. A structural read of which ownership model best fits expert-witness economics, and what the British LLPs look like through that lens.
How a single researcher, with no programming background, built a 90-firm Companies House pipeline in a weekend, turned it into a 12-piece series, and prepared the entire dataset for public release.
About the series. Written by Leath Al Obaidi in a private capacity. Independent research, not commissioned work. The dataset is a snapshot of the UK economics-consultancy market as of April 2026; the prose is narrative-led, with quantitative claims grounded in named sources (mostly filed Companies House accounts, plus Global Competition Review coverage, press releases, and obituaries). Corrections welcome, contact via leathalobaidi.com.