Airports get firms off the ground as workloads dive

Balfour Beatty favoured graft over a summer holiday this August. It won a £460m deal to rebuild Heathrow’s Terminal 2, having presumably impressed BAA by completing the first phase of the project ahead of schedule last November. This contributed more than half of the company’s total for August, which if we include civils was about five times greater than Vinci, the firm in number two spot.

If we exclude civils, August was even quieter than usual. Balfour grabbed 60 jobs worth £188m of the £1.1bn of non-civils work won by the 30 most successful contractors; this compares with £1.4bn in August 2009 and £2.3bn in 2008. The table including civils shows a similar downward trend, dropping from £3.4bn in August 2008 to £2.3bn in 2009 and £1.9bn this year.

With such meagre pickings there were few showpiece jobs for Balfour to celebrate - a £17m student block in Reading was the underwhelming highlight. University work also provided the highlight for Vinci, which won a £28m academic block at Coventry university. The firm won 42 contracts worth a combined £147m in the non-civils world.

With civils work included, Vinci stood slightly better. Once again, it was airports that made the difference: the French-owned contractor’s main civils success was a £16.4m deal to redevelop Gatwick’s South terminal in time for the start of the 2012 London Olympics.

Laing O’Rourke was third in the table, picking up £105m of work from just two deals, the biggest of which was a £90m redevelopment of Manchester’s grade II-listed town hall and central library.

Morgan Sindall, last month’s top-placed firm in the non-civils table, dropped down to fourth, winning just £96m of work in August, compared with £196m in July, when it was boosted by some chunky Scottish hospital work. This month the best it could come up with was the month’s third big airport job: a £30m energy centre at Heathrow for BAA.

For more rankings of UK contractors and consultants log on to www.building.co.uk/leaguetables