Laing O'Rourke gets top marks with £200m London BSF deal

A large win in the London borough of Newham propelled Laing O’Rourke to the top of the leader board in January.

It was not Olympics-related but predictably came from the public sector in the form of a £200m Building Schools for the Future (BSF) deal.

This set the tone for a month that saw a total of 271 contract wins worth £1.46bn among the top 30 contractors. Only £361m of the work came from the commercial sector, with a large slice of the rest coming in the form of education or social housing deals.

The total haul of £1.46bn was 39% down on last January’s figure of £2.4bn. It was also down on December’s total of £1.71bn from 255 contracts.

In second place was Carillion with six deals worth a combined £148.9m. Despite the general dip in commercial work they included a £30m deal with HSBC and a £78.6m contract for Grosvenor Estates in London.

Rok extended its successful start to the year and finished in third spot. So happy was the repair and maintenance specialist with its 2009 performance that it reminded the stock exchange on Monday morning that it had won eight major framework deals, worth £164m, so far this year. The January wins included a £92m four-year deal with the Guinness Trust housing association.

In fourth place was Morgan Sindall with wins that included a £17.5m deal for the National Construction College in Norfolk and an £18.6m Liverpool BSF contract.

The top five was completed by BAM Construct, which continued to pick up education deals. They included a £66m contract with the University of York and a £15m deal for Leeds Metropolitan University.

Balfour Beatty came top of the list when civils was included, thanks to its £750m win for the eastern campus development programme at Heathrow airport.

It also pulled away from Laing O’Rourke at the top of the rolling leader board with over £4bn worth of work won in the year to date.