The MOD just committed £26bn. Start your clearance now.

A big week for the public purse. Three government-backed programmes landed inside five days, and between them they tell you where the leadership demand goes next.

From my desk

One week, three announcements, roughly £29bn of committed public money. The Ministry of Defence set out a £26bn rebuild of the naval bases, the health security campus at Harlow came back from the dead at £1.2bn, and Balfour Beatty and Morrison Construction paired up to chase the £1.9bn A9 framework. Set that against a housing market where new-build listings are at their lowest since 2017.

I wrote a fortnight ago that the market was splitting in two. The precise version is this. The growing half is not simply infrastructure, it is the government-funded half. Defence, nuclear, water, health security. If your firm's forward workload depends on a private developer taking a punt, this is a harder year than the headline numbers suggest.

New on my desk this week, a Commercial Director for ground engineering with a tier-one contractor in Glasgow. Ground engineering is not a glamorous seat, but look at what is coming. Dry docks at Faslane, reactor bases, reservoirs, 92km of new dual carriageway through Highland geology. Everything on that list starts underground, and the commercial leaders who understand that risk are thinner on the ground than the pipeline needs.

The week in construction

• The MOD launched Project Royal Oak, a £26bn ten-year rebuild of docks, berths and engineering facilities at Faslane, Devonport and Portsmouth, splitting £15.1bn to the Clyde, £7.1bn to Devonport and £3.9bn to Portsmouth. The driver is submarine maintenance after years of under-investment. This is the largest naval infrastructure commitment since the Cold War, and it lands as a decade of secured workload rather than a bidding round. Defence has quietly become a career sector, not a side project. (New Civil Engineer)
• UKHSA reopened the £1.2bn national health security campus at Harlow, frozen since 2022 on cost grounds. It is testing the market before choosing between one mega D&B and multiple packages, with an engagement day on 10 September and a tender notice due in November. Construction runs 2028 to 2038, and the Category 4 containment labs go through a separate contest. A stalled scheme coming back at a higher number is the clearest signal yet that health and science infrastructure is being treated as strategic spend. (Construction Enquirer)
• Balfour Beatty and Galliford Try's Morrison Construction formed a joint venture to bid the remaining five A9 dualling packages, worth about £1.9bn under Transport Scotland's NEC4 framework. That is roughly 92km of dual carriageway, built between 2027 and 2035. When two firms of that size decide to share the risk rather than fight each other for it, read it as a verdict on the ground conditions and the programme, not on the money. (Construction Enquirer)
• Laing O'Rourke confirmed a major expansion of its offsite manufacturing, moving Crown House Technologies Manufacturing to a bigger Smethwick facility and adding 3,200 sq m at Explore Park, backed by a record £17.2bn order book. Industrialised construction has been talked about for twenty years. Someone is now spending capital on it at scale, and that changes the kind of production and engineering leaders the sector needs. (Construction Enquirer)
• Speller Metcalfe posted a record £5m pre-tax profit on turnover that dipped slightly to £159m, lifting margin from 2.1% to 3.15%, with average cash up by more than a third to £32m and 98% of next year's budgeted workload already secured. Turnover down, profit up, workload locked in. That is what discipline looks like in a soft market, and it is a better place to build a career than a firm chasing volume. (Construction Enquirer)

People on the move

Courtney McCormick becomes Chief Executive of GRAHAM on 1 September, stepping up from twelve years as the group's CFO. He succeeds Andrew Bill, who retires after more than forty years with the business. The handover comes off a strong year, with revenue up 16% to £1.23bn and pre-tax profit up 42% to £36m. A finance chief inheriting a business in good health usually means continuity rather than a reset, and forty years of institutional memory walking out of the door is the harder thing to replace. (Construction Enquirer)

Stuart Togwell, Chief Executive of Kier, was appointed deputy co-chair of the Construction Leadership Council, succeeding AtkinsRéalis regional president Richard Robinson. He keeps the Kier seat and picks up three of the CLC's five priorities, covering net zero and the circular economy, business model reform, and the digitalisation of planning and building control. Business model reform is the one to watch. A sitting tier-one chief executive now owns that file. (Construction News)

One thing about this section, since I went back through the data behind it this week. It runs off a feed I built that watches senior appointments and tiers them by seniority, and since September it has logged 26 genuinely senior moves across the whole tier-one landscape. Twenty-six, in ten months, for an industry this size. The senior market is far smaller than the noise around it suggests, which is why a single seat changing hands moves so much.

The second number corrected me. Of those 26, only three were finance, commercial or legal seats. The rest were operational: managing directors, divisional chief executives, sector directors, people who run the work. I made a point a fortnight ago about commercial and legal leadership arriving at the top table, and that is true as far as it goes. The data says the operators still hold the floor.

Other areas of interest

I wrote something longer this week, and it is the other half of the story above. If the growing half of the market is government-funded, the question for the private half is what actually unlocks land. The Ground Beneath Us works through what a land value tax would really do to construction, on the assumption it stops being a seminar topic and becomes policy.

The short version. Land value is the residual in any appraisal, the number left after costs. An annual tax on land cannot inflate build costs, so it comes out of what a developer can pay for the site. Land prices fall. That is the mechanism, not a side effect. SME housebuilders and brownfield regeneration do well out of it, strategic land promoters and the South East do not, and patience stops being a strategy.

The part that gave me pause is the transition. Development finance is secured on land, so reprice land quickly and you are into covenant breaches and stalled sites, which is 2008 to 2013 again. The mechanism matters more than the principle. I am genuinely unsure whether making land expensive to hold unlocks building or just reprices it, and if you hold strategic land and have modelled this, I would like to know what your numbers are telling you.

One useful thing

If any part of that £26bn defence programme appeals, start your security clearance conversation now rather than when the role appears. SC takes weeks, DV can take the better part of a year, and neither can be rushed once a client needs someone on site. Clearance is sponsored, so you cannot simply go and buy it, but you can get yourself into a cleared environment on a smaller scheme and let it follow you. On a ten-year programme, the constraint will not be talent. It will be cleared talent.

What I'm working on

My desk is still weighted towards healthcare leadership, with two international searches running in parallel, a Head of Health for Canada around Toronto and a Head of Health for the US west coast in the San Francisco Bay Area, both building out the healthcare sector for a growing builder. Closer to home, the new ground engineering Commercial Director in Glasgow, a Design Director in London, and a Group Commercial Director and Chief People Officer brief. If any of that is your world, or you just have a view on where the cleared people are going to come from, reply and tell me. You can see everything I am running at lechley.com/jobs.