Thousands of football fans watched their teams play this weekend thanks to two inventions that are proud moments in the history of Mouchel - reinforced concrete, which built the stadiums they sat in, and, happily for spectators sat in the Blackburn end at Ewood Park, goal nets.

They are also indicative of the innovation that Mouchel, or Mouchel Parkman as it was known until last year, prides itself on.

Louis Gustave Mouchel founded Mouchel in 1897 when he arrived in Britain from France with the first ever UK licence to reinforce concrete with iron bars.

John Alexander Brodie was a founding partner of the original Parkman and a huge Liverpool Football Club supporter. A civil engineer who began his professional career on the Mersey Docks, he invented the goal net in 1891. He called it his proudest moment (although he would surely have enjoyed himself in East Lancashire on Saturday, as Liverpool put three goals past Blackburn Rovers).

For Richard Cuthbert, chief executive of the £657 million-turnover company, innovation is equally important. Mouchel has moved on from being a civil engineering practice to a broadly based provider of outsourced services. The next direction that Mr Cuthbert hopes to take the company is towards running schools. Both the Conservatives and Labour have signalled that they would like more private-sector involvement in education. Labour wants to see more of its controversial City academies, while the Tories have proposed a Swedish-style voucher system for schools, if they get into power. The idea is that this would encourage more private schools to open up, run by the likes of Mouchel.

“We are heavily involved in the infrastructure surrounding schools already and, if there is a broader role for us to play, we would be interested,” Mr Cuthbert said.

He is yet to go to Sweden to see how the schools idea works on the ground, but he is enthusiastic about the Conservative policy and thinks it would be a natural progression for the business. It has an education department, employing former teachers and local authority education directors, and is a big provider of design and consultancy services to various academies. Last week, Mouchel and Babcock, its partner, reached financial close on a £167 million Building Schools for the Future programme, in which it will rebuild or refurbish ten schools in Hackney, East London.

When he left WS Atkins to become Mouchel's chief executive in 2002, the former civil engineer was happy to continue repositioning the company down the government services path. Now 60 per cent of its revenues come from local authorities and 95 per cent from the public sector in general.

This strong reliance on public sector spending leaves Mouchel attractively positioned as the economy slides. Mouchel and Parkman, which merged in 2003, missed out on the last boom in the commercial property sector by moving their businesses away from their traditional international consulting engineering roots, but that also means that now the company is avoiding the sector's slump.

“Our strategy was to find a steady revenue stream that was not so cyclical. Now we are as well positioned as anyone to benefit from the downturn,” Mr Cuthbert said. “Talk to any finance director or chief executive of any local authority and their biggest headache right now is their ballooning deficit on public sector pensions, which has been exacerbated by the collapse in the markets.

“At the same time, the councils are seeing receipts from developers and housebuilders through planning gain dry up and their funding from central government is threatened.

“Local authorities have to make savings and become more efficient and hopefully they will recognise that we can help there. There has long been talk about district councils, for instance, running shared back offices. Perhaps we are now reaching a tipping point.”

Mouchel bought HBS, a business process outsourcing (BPO) business formerly known as Hyder Business Services, from Terra Firma, Guy Hands's private equity business, in 2007 in preparation for attacking this territory. This year it added Hedra, another BPO business.

The private sector, Mr Cuthbert argued, can provide a more efficient service. “It's not about private good, public bad, but a recognition that together we can do more than local authorities can on their own. We don't get so much political intervention. Some companies want a part of public spending. We want to save it.” It is a pitch that many may find attractive.

The company claims to have strong relationships with the public sector unions, but the more it gets involved in this territory the greater the risk that it will attract the criticism and protests of the unions.

Beyond local authorities, another 35 per cent of Mouchel's revenue comes from the public sector in the form of the Highways Agency, the railways - it has a key Crossrail contract already - and the regulated water industry.

Contracts from the Highways Agency helped to attract investors at the time that Mouchel and Parkman were floated, in the first two years of this decade. There has been some concern that the company has missed out on recent contract awards. “The Highways Agency is still our biggest client and we are excited that they are extending active traffic management,” Mr Cuthbert said.

Active traffic management is the practice of using the hard shoulder to widen motorways at busy times, which Mouchel has been operating for the agency on the M42. Mr Cuthbert suggested that this would become one of the primary ways of managing congestion on the motorway network, more so than road-pricing. Meanwhile, towns and cities would use a combination of congestion-charging and park-and-ride schemes to manage urban traffic problems.

Mouchel even has sights on the humble traffic warden. Many local authorities are looking to outsource parking services and are looking for CCTV to have a bigger role in enforcing parking measures. Ideally, traffic wardens would become a council's ambassadors and would help the public around urban areas, keeping traffic flowing, rather than simply be motivated by the number of tickets they slap on windscreens.

If that sounds a bit hard to believe, then maybe it is because it's hard to envisage the future until it's actually invented. Who would have thought that hanging a net between two upright posts would create such a stir.

Richard Cuthbert CV

Born: 1953

Education: BSc (Hons) Civil Engineering, University Of Leeds, 1974; MSc Transport Planning, University of Leeds, 1975

Career: 1975-80 WS Atkins;

1980-81 Freeman Fox & Partners, project Manager for transport studies, UK;

1981-85 Associate at Colin Buchanan & Partners where he worked in Kuwait, Indonesia and Turkey;

1986-2002 WS Atkins, starting as a project director in Kuwait, worked his way up to become group executive director, UK;

2002-present group chief executive Mouchel, previously the Parkman Group

Lives: Reigate, Surrey

Family: Married to Julia, two sons aged 18 and 14

Hobbies: Sport, especially playing hockey and tennis

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