RLB Cut 40 Jobs With No Warning, Partners Included. It Says It Is Still Hiring.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
In short. RLB (Rider Levett Bucknall), the quantity surveying and construction cost consultancy, made at least 40 people redundant across its UK business earlier this month, from partner level down, at offices in London, Birmingham and Manchester [1]. The company puts the figure at under 2 percent of UK staff and says it followed a review of the business; one affected employee says the cuts felt random. The ledger logs a loss of 40, graded ANNOUNCED, region UK-wide, ai_cited: no.
What happened. RLB made at least 40 people redundant across its UK operations this month, affecting staff at every level from partner down, at the firm's London, Birmingham and Manchester offices [1]. The firm says the figure amounts to under 2 percent of its UK headcount, and that its European offices were not affected. A company statement given to the trade press said: "As a business we have a responsibility to be future fit. Therefore, we undertook a review of our business to focus on the needs of our clients and the opportunities of growth in our sector earlier in the year... We recognise the impact these changes have had on colleagues, and supported those affected throughout the process" [1].
That is not how it looked from inside. One affected employee told the same trade title: "This came completely out of the blue with people losing their jobs in London, Birmingham and Manchester... It seems to us that jobs were cut almost at random to meet a quota and it has created a lot of unease and unrest at the business" [1]. RLB also says it continues to invest in its people and is recruiting in key areas, a claim that sits alongside, rather than answering, the account of how the cuts themselves were carried out.
How the ledger logs it
A loss of 40, graded ANNOUNCED, region UK-wide. The figure and the company's own framing come from trade press reporting of RLB's statement, not from a Gazette notice or a filed disclosure, so ANNOUNCED is the correct grade under this site's rules; it is also, deliberately, the smallest single loss row on this ledger so far, because a jobs tracker that only logs four-figure closures is not tracking the labour market, it is tracking headlines. Region is logged UK-wide rather than any single nation or region because the cuts span three English regions at once (London, the West Midlands and the North West) and no breakdown by site was given.
This is a single-sourced row. A search for independent corroboration turned up only a near-identical RLB redundancy story from June 2020, when the firm cut a similar share of staff citing the Covid-19 lockdown; that story was checked against its own publication date and ruled out as a separate round six years earlier, not this one, before being discarded. The current story rests on one trade title, Construction Enquirer, fetched directly rather than from a search summary. That is thinner sourcing than this week's other row, and the note says so plainly rather than presenting one outlet as more corroborated than it is.
What the company says caused it
A business review, not a downturn it names. RLB's own explanation is about being "future fit" for client needs and sector growth opportunities, phrasing broad enough to cover almost any restructuring decision. Nothing in the statement attributes the cuts to a lack of work, a client loss, or to AI or automation; nowhere does the company or the affected employee mention artificial intelligence as a factor either. AI is not cited here, in either direction, and this site does not add what nobody has claimed.
The gap between the company's account and the employee's is the more interesting fact than the raw number. RLB frames the redundancies as a considered review; the employee's account describes speed and randomness, "almost at random to meet a quota." Both statements are on the record, from the sides that made them, and both are logged as exactly that, not resolved into a single verdict this ledger has no evidence to reach.
What happens next in this ledger
RLB says it is continuing to hire in other parts of the business, a claim this ledger has no way to verify from a single article and will not credit as a gain without its own source. The construction consultancy sector has no other row on this ledger yet; if RLB's redundancies turn out to be the first of a wider pattern across quantity surveying and cost consultancy firms, rather than a one-off, that pattern is what the next entry would need to show.
Sources
- Construction Enquirer, "Consultant RLB cuts staff numbers," 10 September 2026 (company statement, employee account, headcount and location detail). https://www.constructionenquirer.com/2026/09/10/consultant-rlb-cuts-staff-numbers/