Barnes Construction

This business is a main contractor and deals with a range of commercial projects. It is a management contractor and most of the staff are involved directly or indirectly in the management of contracts. The business employs a range of sub-contractors for each project. These provide much of the expertise and labour for the actual construction works.

Most projects are in the Eastern region and around London. For selected clients, work has been carried out across the UK, from Cornwall to Scotland.

• Typical contract size is between £0.5 and £30m.
• Project duration is between 6 to 30 months.
• The business currently employs 113 staff across:
  • Pre-contracts (tendering process and related activities) - 18
  • Construction (site management and oversight of the build process) - 51
  • Surveying (procuring sub-contractors for projects, monitoring the value of the works completed) -14
  • Buying, trainees, direct labour, and administration - 30
• Clients are mainly spread across the following sectors.
  • Local authority education
  • Hospital work
  • Hotels
  • Cambridge Colleges
  • General commercial works including EDF at Sizewell
  • Hospices

The main sources of work are local authority frameworks, individual client relationships, and consultant introductions, particularly quantity surveyors and architects. The long-term development of the business’ reputation as a non-adversarial and collaborative contractor with good quality standards is very important to a significant proportion of the work opportunities and the basis of contract negotiation.

Much of the work bid for is subject to a client evaluation process that involves scoring for quality as well as for the monetary value of the tenders submitted. Frameworks are usually renewed every 3 to 5 years and, again, there is a scoring process on the quality of the responses to a range of questions in standard questionnaires as well as on the basic intended cost structure for charging running costs to assignments (known as preliminaries).

To view Barnes Constructions' Management Team, click here.