“The main gist of this is that the business is going to survive.”

Stephen Rawlinson, analyst with Applied Value, is running the rule over last week’s numbers from Kier. They weren’t pretty. It racked up £341m of exceptional items which helped send it tumbling from a £106m pre-tax profit in 2018 to a £245m pre-tax loss this time around. Chief executive Andrew Davies admitted: “It’s not a good set of results.”

But Rawlinson’s comments chime with most analysts’ thinking: that while the numbers are bloody, it could have been worse.

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