Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

The top 50 practitioners in Accountancy Age’s annual league table together piled an extra £1 billion-plus on top of the previous year’s revenues to gross £8.7 bn – but £6.35bn of that total was accumulated by the Big Four - PricewaterhouseCoopers (1st, £1.98bn), Deloitte (2nd, £1.79bn), third placed KPMG (£1.45bn) and fourth placed Ernst & Young (£1.13bn).

There’s then a yawning gap to fifth placed Grant Thornton on £387.1m and the last of the Big Six, BDO Stoy Hayward (£330m).

While many firms are reporting a surge in real estate work and fee income, audit remains the biggest money spinner, according to Accountancy Age.

Other major findings in the magazine’s annual review are that women comprise just 9.7 per cent of partners within firms and the number of female qualified accountants has fallen year-on-year by two percentage points.

And partners are growing older, leading some observers to the view that succession problems are looming and that this could lead to greater consolidation in the marketplace.

Of the top six, Ernst & Young posted the biggest hike in fee income with a turbo-charged 20 per cent increase, followed by Deloitte and BDO (each 15 per cent up), KPMG (14 per cent higher) and PwC (11 per cent up). Grant Thornton fell back to 9 per cent growth.

Deloitte was top dog for average fee per partner at £2.9m, followed by KPMG (£2.6m) and PwC (£2.5m) although Ernst & Young’s respective figure was not supplied, according to the magazine.

Several other firms with a significant East of England presence figure in the Accountancy age top 50. Only one saw a drop in fee income – Price Bailey, whose revenue slipped 1.7 per cent.

Other placings (with UK fee income, percentage growth and fee per partner in parenthesis) were as follows:- 7th Baker Tilly (£200.4m, 9 per cent, £1.5m); 9th PKF (£130.4m, 12 per cent, £1.4m); 14th Bentley Jennison (£63.7m, 10 per cent, £0.9m); 16th Saffrey Champness (£44.7m, 13.3 per cent, £0.8m); 21st MacIntyre Hudson (£24.4m, 6.4 per cent, £0.5m); 33rd Lovewell Blake (£13.7m, 5.4 per cent, £0.6m); 40th Larking Gowen (£11.7m, 4.6 per cent, £0.5m); 42nd Price Bailey (£11.5m, -1.7 per cent, £0.6m); 46th Streets (£10.4m, 6.1 per cent, £1m).