Balfour Beatty tops January CJ50 with nearly £900m of new work

Balfour Beatty has topped the CJ50 table for the second month in a row, flying past its competitors thanks to a bumper deal with BAA. The firm won 67 contracts worth £888m, almost four times ahead of its nearest rival, Laing O’Rourke.

• View the full CJ50 league table for January
• View the latest 12 month CJ50 league table

It was the highest total won by a single contractor since March 2008 – when Balfour Beatty secured almost £1bn worth of work - and propelled the total orders for January to a relatively stable £2.5bn.

Infrastructure projects were again the main source, accounting for 41% of January’s total at £1bn, closely followed by £838m worth of public sector work.

The majority of infrastructure work was won by Balfour Beatty, who secured the £750m deal to provide a major part of the works associated with the Eastern Campus Development Programme at Heathrow Airport as part of its £6.6bn framework deal with BAA.

Some way behind Balfour Beatty in second was Laing O’Rourke who secured £228m worth of work in the public sector, while Costain leapt nine places to third having £150m worth of civils work.

One of the few companies to secure any commercial work was Carillion, who moved up ten places to fourth. It is to start work on a £78m residential development adjacent to the Tate Modern on The Thames for a Grosvenor Estates/Native Land joint venture and will construct new £30m office space for HSBC in London.

Rok slid three places to fifth but still scooped over a third of all private housing. It won 23 projects worth £140m, by far the most significant of which was a £93m deal to build new homes under a variety of schemes as part of a four year framework deal with Guiness Trust.

Moving up to sixth Morgan Sindall won £117m worth of work. The pick of the bunch were a £18m BSF deal in Liverpool and the contract to build the £17.5m National Construction College in Norfolk.

Projects of note elsewhere include BAM Construct’s £66m deal with the University of York, a £46m mental health facility on Northamptonshire won by GB Building Solutions and B&Q’s new £45m headquarters in Eastleigh won by Sir Robert McAlpine.