Forty-two years,
one owner.

Alan Brackenridge started in 1984 with a JCB, a flatbed and a contract to lay drainage on an industrial estate in Hunslet. For the first nine years the company did nothing but groundworks, mostly as a subcontractor to main contractors who are no longer trading.

That is still the centre of the business. We took on the building above the ground in 1993 and the fit out inside it in 2004, but the reason clients come to us for a £14m mill conversion is usually that somebody told them we know what is under it.

Kate Brackenridge took over as managing director in 2016. We have been approached to sell four times, most recently in 2024, and the answer has been the same each time.

Ninety-one on the tools and site management, twenty-seven in the office at Sweet Street West. Average length of service is nine years and two months, and eleven people have been here more than twenty-five years.

We run six apprenticeships at any one time through Leeds College of Building, paid from day one at the real Living Wage, and we have taken on 34 apprentices since 2009 of whom 26 are still with us. Two are now contracts managers.

Every site over £1m has a full-time site manager, a temporary works co-ordinator and a named contracts manager who does not carry more than three jobs at once. That last one is expensive and is the main reason our programmes hold.

Five consecutive years with no RIDDOR-reportable incidents, across eleven live sites and 2.1 million operative hours. Our accident frequency rate is 0.09 against an industry average of 0.32.

We are CHAS accredited, Constructionline Gold, and hold ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001. Every operative holds a CSCS card and every site has at least two first aiders and a trained mental health first aider.

We publish our near-miss numbers internally every month and they go up, not down, which is what a reporting culture looks like when it is working. In 2025 we recorded 412 near-misses. We would be worried by a lower figure.

Sixty-eight per cent of our subcontract and materials spend in 2025 went to businesses within thirty miles of Leeds. We publish that figure in every tender because we are asked for it in every tender, and because we would rather be held to it.

We take two work experience placements per site from the nearest secondary school, and our site managers deliver a Considerate Constructors talk at each of them. On Calder Vale Academy that was eleven sessions across two years.

We are a real Living Wage employer and we require it of every subcontractor working on our sites. It costs us roughly 2% on labour and it removes an argument we do not want to be having.