Balfour Beatty lands £100m Coventry & Warwickshire contract

INFRASTRUCTURE group Balfour Beatty has announced details of a new £100m contract to provide maintenance support to Coventry and Warwickshire’s highways and bridges network.

The five-year contract, which began this month, has a four-year extension clause conditional to meeting performance targets.

The contract is significant for the group as it predicted today that short term recovery in the UK and US markets was likely to be slow.

The group has also announced details of a similar contract with Cambridgeshire County Council to provide its street lighting service. The 25-year contract is worth around £100m.

Balfour Beatty said the contracts added significant volume to its Support Services order book and were notable in highlighting the changes in local authority requirements, with a marked shift towards larger, multi-activity contracts and the bundling together of contracts from more than one local authority.

The Coventry and Warwickshire contract involves full maintenance of the area’s highways and bridges together with street lighting.  

Kevin Craven, chief executive of Balfour Beatty Support Services, said: “We are developing our business to serve the Local Authority market more effectively. Balfour Beatty is well-placed in respect of the changing nature of local authority contracts which favour companies that can offer a broad range of capabilities, thereby providing savings as well as improved services for local government.”

In a management statement, the group, which has a global business generating more than £10bn of revenue across 80 countries, said it expected global infrastructure to be an attractive growth market in the medium to long term.

“We have put in place a clear strategy, and the group is well-placed to benefit from the growth in this market based on our depth of infrastructure knowledge, breadth of capability and the strength of our balance sheet.

“While we do not expect, in the short term, a meaningful recovery in the UK and US infrastructure markets, we continue to expect to make progress this year,” it added.

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