News

JRL has submitted plans for a new residential block in Manchester city centre. The firm’s contracting arm, Midgard, will build the housing block if it receives planning approval. The scheme would provide 359 homes in total across a part-10-storey, part-28-storey building in Sparkle Street, near Manchester Piccadilly Station. JRL has…

Contractors have been alerted to a two-year-long job to revamp a port construction site in Ayrshire, Scotland. The £150m job at Hunterston Construction Yard, which is part of the Clydeport facility serving Glasgow, will cover design and construction work. First, the contractor will fill in and drain the dry dock…

Plans for the next five-year period of road investment have been delayed due to the general election, Construction News can reveal. A draft of the third road investment strategy (RIS3), outlining which road schemes the government will fund between 2025-2030, was due to be published in late May. However, in…

An Irish government official has accused Bam of backtracking on a promise to complete a new national children’s hospital in Dublin this year. Eamonn Quinn, head of major capital projects in the country’s Department of Health, said the contractor should “meet its commitments” on the troubled project. Bam was appointed…

Major contractors including Balfour Beatty and Morgan Sindall are demanding a new financing model from the next government to drive private investment in infrastructure. The contractors, also joined by the likes of Mace, Costain and Laing O’Rourke, warned that the next government can only meet its national targets around net…

Inflationary pressures and higher interest rates failed to stop Essex-based D&B Scaffolding from posting higher revenue and profit for last year. Its latest accounts, covering the year ending 31 August 2023, show that turnover increased by 2.2 per cent from £18.5m to £18.9m. And pre-tax profit almost doubled from £1m…

Delays to a leisure centre development in London have been blamed on rules around election-time funding. Kingston Council said that “strict rules around the use of council resources” in the weeks running up to an election meant it was unable to push forward with plans to replace the old Kingfisher…

Welsh firm Andrew Scott has been appointed to finish one of collapsed contractor Buckingham Group’s remaining schemes. Andrew Scott will finish a multistorey car park and commercial site in the centre of Swansea, after the project stalled following Buckingham’s descent into administration. Buckingham had been delivering the Copr Bay scheme,…

The next government should fund building-safety remediation works, abolish retentions and ban late-paying firms from winning public sector jobs, according to the National Federation of Builders (NFB). In its Supporting Construction to Power Growth manifesto, released yesterday (30 May), the industry body also urges a smarter approach to retrofitting plus…

Kier has landed a job to build an accommodation block and workshop at HMP Bullingdon, Construction News can reveal. The contractor scooped the design-and-build contract to construct a seventh houseblock at the category B prison, which will increase its capacity by 247 to more than 1,300. The four-storey block will…