Bouygues tops league table with big student-accommodation wins

Bouygues’ UK arm has topped the monthly contractors’ league for the second time this year, propelled to the top spot by two big accommodation projects.

The French multinational’s UK construction division won £268.1m in total over the month. An £80m student-accommodation scheme for the University of Chichester (pictured) was among the seven contracts the firm won in August. Meanwhile, Equans, which was acquired by Bouygues in 2022, was appointed to carry out £72m of remediation work on the Paragon Estate, an embattled modular residential and student accommodation development that was evacuated in 2020 due to structural defects.

A £150m events hub in the North East pushed Lendlease to second place. The Sage International Conference Centre in Gateshead will form a central node of a scheme to redevelop part of the River Tyne’s south bank, and is due to open in 2025. Lendlease also won another building job worth £42.6m.

The highest-value single contract in August was awarded to SGN, which took on a £190m biogas upgrade for Yorkshire Water in Leeds. Despite this being SGN’s only contract win of the month, the scale of the project pushed the company to third place in the list.

Last month’s champion Royal Bam dropped to seventh place, picking up four contracts worth a total £92.1m. The Dutch company won big in July with a share on a huge undersea cable scheme.

Hitachi Energy, the project’s other preferred supplier, took last month’s second spot but has now dropped out of the top 50 entirely.

RG Group made a rare appearance in August’s top 10 after being appointed as the main contractor on a student-accommodation project in Nottingham.

Kier won the most contracts in August, securing 17 jobs worth £180.8m, 10 more than Bouygues. The contract-signing spree helped the firm rise two places from July, to sit at fourth place.

However, this was not enough to keep Kier at the top of the annual league table, a spot it had held for a year.

Kier first climbed to the top of the annual league in August 2022, after it won 21 jobs in a month, including a £400m contract to build a major new prison in Yorkshire. Despite its successful month, the firm now sits in fifth place.

Morgan Sindall hit the top spot, also leap-frogging Balfour Beatty, which remains in second place. Morgan Sindall has won £2.08bn of work since 1 September 2022, compared with Balfour Beatty’s £2.04bn and Wates’ (in third-place) £2.03bn.