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The house-building sector accounted for 40% of the new work awarded in November – with 227 new contracts registered, collectively worth £2.3bn.

The contract winning the most work during the  month was BAM, which won four new projects with a combined value of £371m to take the top spot on the BCLive contracts league table for the month. The largest of these was the £350m indoor arena to be built next to Manchester’s Etihad Stadium.  

In second place was Kier, with 30 new contract awards, together valued at just over £361m. The largest of these was the £106m Marylebone Square development for Concord London.

A housing developer rather than a construction contractor is credited with third place in November’s league tables – Berkeley Group – for starting £312.5m-worth of developments, including a £220m scheme at the former Horlicks Factory in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire.

Similarly, fourth place also goes to an organisation that’s is not a construction company either. Be First is the development arm of Barking & Dagenham Council. It signed a deal with Hackman Capital Partners in November for the £300m development of Eastbrook Studios London in Dagenham, set to be the capital’s largest film and TV production centre. It is not clear that construction contracts have actually been awarded on the project yet, but it passes muster for the Builders’ Conference contracts league.

Wates took fifth position for the month with 10 contracts, aggregate value £257m, led by a £100m office development in London’s Piccadilly Circus for Land Securities. Work on this is set to start in April 2021.

November’s monthly total of £5.7bn for new contract awards compares with £5.1bn for the same month in 2019 and just £4.0bn in November 2018 and £4.2bn in November 2017, when perhaps the criteria for what constitutes a construction contract was a little stricter.