However, amid negative perceptions of the conglomerate model, the company was reorganised into four separate listed firms during the mid 1990s, these being: Hanson plc, Imperial Tobacco, The Energy Group and Millennium Chemicals.

In 2007, HeidelbergCement purchased Hanson Plc in exchange for £8 billion to create the second largest cement and building materials company in the world.

[1] Hanson and White were willing to take a wide range of measures to maximise value, including mass redundancies, and therefore attracted opposition and accusations that they were asset strippers.

[2][3] From 1979, the company was successful from the shareholders' point of view and respected during the early 1980s; Hanson (who donated millions of pounds to the Conservatives) was given a life peerage by Britain's then-Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, in June 1983.

To fund this purchase, Hanson broke up UDS and sold John Collier via a management buyout and Richard Shops to Habitat, keeping only the core department store business.

[2][19] Hanson had acquired a 2.8 per cent stake in the company as part of its hostile takeover attempt, which ICI's management team chose to oppose.

[33][34] In early 2002, Dougal parted ways with Hanson, leaving with a controversially large pay-off (variously reported at between £400,000 and £660,000, plus a pension top-up of £636,700).

[37][38] In December 2014, Heidelberg Cement agreed to sell its Hanson Building Products division to the private equity firm Lone Star for £900 million.

[39][40] During 2023, Hanson was reportedly planning the construction of a new carbon capture facility that was aimed at reducing the emissions from their Padeswood cement works.

[44] In March 2024, residents of Glyncoch, near Pontypridd in South Wales, started a series of protests around the over-riding of the local authority's opposition to extend quarrying by the Minister of Climate Change, Julie James.

[45] The appeal report claimed that "The dust assessments concluded that the potential impacts associated with both the continuation of existing activities and the proposed extension would be slight adverse at most."