Costain-led consortium tipped to win £350m Highways Agency deal

A frontrunner is surfacing for a highways maintenance deal potentially worth up to £350m.

Insiders are tipping the A1-Plus group (Costain / Colas / Halcrow) as the Highways Agency's (HA's) preferred bidder for the Area 12 managing agent/contractor MAC scheme.

This means that the incumbent on the job - Carillion / WSP - has been toppled from its perch.

And it also looks like the end of the road for the three other contestants - InterRoute (Balfour Beatty/Mott MacDonald), EnterpriseMouchel and solo-bidder Amey.

Work on site on the new deal will begin in October. The contract will initially run for five years, but there is the potential to increase the term in yearly stages to a maximum of seven.

A source said: "The present incumbent used to be favourite to win the job the second time around. But recently that seems to have gone out of the window.

"In these hard times, value for money is everything and bidding wars are becoming increasingly bloody - especially where long-term work is guaranteed."

He continued: "With so much at stake, submissions would have been assessed in great depth - track records, health and safety issues, finance, CAT ratings and so on."

The Area 12 job takes in motorways and A-roads in Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Greater Manchester and Yorkshire and includes delivering improvement schemes up to £1m in value, work on structures, plus cyclic and winter maintenance.