The total value of new construction work awarded across the UK in August 2020 was £4.8bn, according to Builders’ Conference data. More than half of this is in house-building.
Top of the table was Midgard won a £230m contract to build a mixed-use development of 212 homes, a primary school, new public realm and car parking. And it also won a separate £150m contract for enabling works on the same project, Builders’ Conference says. [However, according to the JRL Group itself, Midgard's contract at this Battersea Exchange site is worth £85m.]
The BCLive contracts league table these days includes house-building projects not just built under contract for third-party or local authority clients, but also speculative private sector developments initiated by the builders themselves.
On this basis, it has Redrow Homes in second place for August. The Builders’ Conference says Redrow signed 13 contracts in August, totalling £276m, with the largest . The most significant of these is a £50m expansion of its development in Abingdon, Oxfordshire called The Lawns.
Third was Vinci Construction, which picked up five contracts during the month worth a total of £243m, including a £100m waste recycling facility at Edmonton EcoPark in London.
Builders’ Conference managing director Neil Edwards pointed out that 70% of the work let in August was in the private sector, revealing little evidence of the government’s supposed build-build-build drive
“Whether those government statements have yet to come to fruition or whether they were empty promises and sound-bites is hard to tell,” Neil Edwards said. “But any increase in government spending has thus far failed to redress the balance between private and publicly financed projects.”
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