More than 50 jobs lost as Lanarkshire renewable energy firm collapses

More than 50 jobs have been lost as a renewable energy company has collapsed into administration.

Levenseat Renewable Energy Ltd (LREL), based in South Lanarkshire, called in administrators on Thursday, who immediately cut 52 of the company’s 89 jobs.

Remaining staff have been kept on while operations are wound down and the site is cleaned up, consultancy firm PwC said.

Levenseat Renewable Energy has operated an energy-from-waste plant in Forth since 2020.

As the company entered administration on Thursday, Sarah O’Toole and Edward Williams of PwC were appointed as joint administrators.

“It is with deep regret that 52 of the 89 employees had to be made redundant immediately on appointment,” a spokesperson for PwC said.

“The administrators will retain some employees to support in winding down operations and clean-up of waste materials on site.”

Levenseat Renewable Energy, which is an offshoot from Levenseat Ltd, was incorporated in 2014 and it was headquartered at the Levenseat Waste Management Site in Forth, South Lanarkshire.

In recent years, the company has experienced outages due to machine failures which required significant funding to fix.

According to the latest full accounts on Companies House, Levenseat Renewable Energy reported a loss of more than £28m in 2023, and was forced to negotiate deferred loan repayments until June 2025.

Directors had hoped to secure crucial investments before that date, but they failed, leading them to declare the company insolvent.

Despite sharing part of a name with LREL and benefitting from previous operational support from the energy firm, Levenseat Resource Management (LRM) has assured its investors and employees that things are “business as usual”.

“You may have heard the recent news that Levenseat Renewable Energy Ltd (LREL) has entered into administration. We want to reassure you that Levenseat Resource Management (LRM), is a separate company and has not entered administration,” a statement from the company said.

A spokesperson for the new LREL administrators added: “The administrators are working closely with the Redundancy Payments Service (RPS) to ensure that those affected receive their statutory entitlements as soon as possible.”