Civil Engineering & Groundworks

Half of Leeds is built on made ground over coal measures, and a good proportion of the sites we are asked to price have had at least one industrial life already. What is under the surface is the single largest source of programme risk on a commercial project, and it is the thing most often priced off a desk study and two boreholes.

So we do our own ground investigation before we commit to a groundworks price, and we would rather spend £14,000 finding out than £400,000 discovering. On the last eleven schemes where we did that, three came back materially different from the original desk study.

In-house we hold CPCS-carded operators, our own excavation and attachment fleet, and a temporary works co-ordinator on every site over £1m. Piling and specialist remediation are subcontracted to two firms we have used since 2011 and who we name in the tender.