“I’ve never worked so hard in my life on a job I was never going to build,” Laing O’Rourke veteran Mark Platt says. As someone who has been employed by the firm for nearly three decades, he still seems a bit baffled that his latest job involved securing work for Kier. 

But that is exactly what Laing, Wates and ISG did on the government’s £1bn prisons programme – and the approach is being hailed as the future of big construction projects.

The scheme to build four new prisons for the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to accommodate adult males is one of the first major capital projects outside of infrastructure to use an alliance model, where multiple main contractors collaborate on a single job. It has thrown four of the UK’s biggest builders into an office, “debadged” them, as they describe it, and effectively made them operate as one team. 

…