The results are in, so which firms have made it into this year’s Top 150 contractors and housebuilders league? Well, one name that hasn’t – and which casts a long shadow by its absence – is Carillion, formerly occupying second place with a whopping turnover of £5.2bn. No more. The main contractor’s ignominious demise has triggered a reshuffle below the titan Balfour Beatty, which retains the top spot. But these manoeuvrings aside, the real story of this year’s data is the stark and indisputable split between the fortunes of contractors and housebuilders.

If we didn’t already know that contractors were in the doldrums while housebuilders have the wind in their sails, these figures would ram the message home: the biggest 10 main contractors with a combined turnover of £31bn made less than £120m in profit. That’s a miserly margin of 0.38% (about one-third of last year’s already unimpressive 1.09% for the same firms). Contrast that with the top 10 housebuilders, which returned an average margin of 19.2%, equating to them making two out of every three pounds of the profit in the whole of the top 150.

When the average margin for all the contractors on the list only reaches 1.7%, even the relatively modest ambition of 5% looks like pie in the sky

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