Regional contracting business to stand alone...

Raine's Hall & Tawse regional contracting business will stay as a stand-alone division within McAlpine.

"We won't merge it with anything we've got," said Whitehead. "Hall & Tawse is a good regional contractor which has made money right through the recession. It has more than 300 contracts on the go, they are of short duration and few are for more than œ1 million.

"It gets a lot of repeat business, does a lot of Design & Build and has a good client list that includes numerous banks and building societies."

Whitehead distanced Hall & Tawse's work from McAlpine's former building division. "We are not going back into the lump sum, big building tender market," he insisted.