Kier was the biggest contractor for the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for the second year in a row, Construction News can reveal.
The company was paid £269.9m in the financial year 2024/25, down slightly from the £294m it earned in 2023/24 (see box below for full list).
Kier’s work for the department in the period included delivering HMP Millsike in North Yorkshire (pictured), the UK’s first all-electric prison.
The £400m Category C institution, built to house 1,500 inmates, is the size of 39 football pitches and is powered by more than 8,500kWh of renewable energy.
CN visited the facility ahead of its opening in March, to examine how challenges such as clearing the ground of hundreds of pieces of live ammunition left from the site’s former use as an RAF base were overcome, with the project delivered on time and on budget.
Elsewhere it is working on prison jobs in Glasgow, Elmley in Kent, and Channings Wood in Devon, where it is due to break ground on 28 August.
Wates was the second biggest supplier to the MoJ, earning £218.5m in the period, a huge increase on the £67.4m it achieved in 2023/24, when it was the fourth largest contractor.
Its jobs included work on the ministry’s houseblocks upgrade programme. It and Kier jointly won a £500m contract for the project in 2022.
Wates and Kier are part of the MoJ’s Alliance 4 New Prisons (A4NP) alongside seventh-placed Laing O’Rourke. ISG was originally part of the alliance, which was set up in 2021 to deliver new prisons.
ISG was the third largest supplier to the ministry in the period, despite it only being in business for five months of the financial year.
The contractor was paid £63.9m for work across a number of projects, including HMP Guys Marsh in Dorset. It was set to deliver 17 per cent of the government’s targeted 20,000 new prison places before it went under.
In January it was revealed that its collapse would cost the MoJ an estimated £300m on its New Prisons Programme.
The contractor was also carrying out remediation work on 23,000 existing cells that do not meet fire-safety requirements.
As reported by CN today (28 August), the MoJ has set aside at least £1.1bn to get 14 construction jobs – many of them former ISG projects – up and running imminently.
Contracts have already been picked up by the likes of Bovis Construction (formerly Lendlease), Willmott Dixon, Galliford Try, Bowmer & Kirkland, Tilbury Douglas, Henry Boot Construction and Henry Brothers.
CN also revealed last week that six subcontractors on ISG projects were threatening the MoJ with legal action after failing to be paid for work on jobs that were covered by project bank accounts (PBAs).
The group said they were left out of pocket despite PBAs being in operation at HMPs Birmingham, Liverpool and Guys Marsh.
A PBA is a ringfenced bank account from which payments are meant to be made directly and simultaneously to a lead contractor and members of the supply chain.
The firms said they had expected to receive money for work – signed off by quantity surveyors – that was carried out in the months running up to ISG’s collapse.
But the MoJ told them no funds were available, instead referring the companies to ISG’s administrators at EY.
One subcontractor, who said his firm was owed almost £200,000 for completed work, said when he found out: “I felt like I’d fallen off a cliff. There’s no value you can put on the emotional rollercoaster you go through when it’s that sort of money.”
The ministry has refused to comment.
| MoJ contractor spend 2024-25 | ||
| Position | Supplier name | Total paid (£m) |
| 1 | Kier Construction | 269.9 |
| 2 | Wates Construction | 218.5 |
| 3 | ISG Construction | 63.9 |
| 4 | Galliford Try | 63.7 |
| 5 | Lendlease Construction (now Bovis) | 52.4 |
| 6 | Vinci Construction UK | 39.1 |
| 7 | Laing O’Rourke | 20.5 |
| 8 | Tilbury Douglas Construction | 11.9 |
| 9 | Algeco UK | 8.3 |
| 10 | Henry Boot Construction | 3.6 |
| 11 | Extraspace | 3.0 |