Hunter Engineering was established in 1936 and is now a public limited company in which the Hunter family owned the controlling interest. It relied solely on Government Contracts as primary source of business. Until the late 1990s, contracts had been placed on a cost plus basis, but with the governments shift in policy towards reductions in public expenditure, the method of placing contracts had been changed to fixed price. Sizes of the contracts were reduced. Instead of relying solely on large contracts involving over a hundred employees or more for up to 5 years, the company handled contracts that frequently involved less than 15 employees for a duration of under two years. Having projects at the right staffing levels and efficiency drives meant that between 1998 and 2012, employee levels had fallen from 1,500 to 720. Staffing levels in the Electrical Engineering Department fell from 45 to 26 over th
e same period. Between 2012 and 2017, further organisational restructuring initiatives resulted in the loss of over 170 employees.
Peter Green, Project Manager in Electrical Engineering, had joined the company in 1987 as a relatively young senior electrical engineer in his early 30s, and for the first ten years of his employment at Hunter Engineering, he worked on just 2 very large projects, each spanning 5 years. He had not enjoyed this long-term project commitment, so was relieved to find himself transferred to smaller projects because of more projects with lower staff levels. After working on 16 smaller projects in various capacities, first as the Project Team Leader, and later as a full Project Manager, he was promoted to Small Projects Director in January 2017. His promotion coincided with the companys decision to rename itself Hunter Engineering Group, a signal that it intended to diversify going forward.