Top contractors enjoy good growth
10th June 2025
UK: The UK’s largest M&E contractors enjoyed collective growth of 23% last year, according to the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA).
The latest edition of the Association’s annual Top 30 Contractors’ report reveals that the combined turnover of the those firms grew to £6.4bn in 2023/24, despite a period of “considerable economic turmoil”.
This represents approximately a quarter of the total M&E market which is estimated at £23.2bn “suggesting room for further consolidation in what is still a highly fragmented sector”, BESA said.
The report, compiled in partnership with chartered quantity surveyors GHCS, technical recruitment firm GH Engage, and industry analysts Barbour ABI, ranks contractors by their total turnover for the previous financial year and is compiled using published company accounts and information from Companies House.
According to the report, the firms are standing up well to “various financial headwinds” and were poised for further growth in 2025.
“The overall mood is surprisingly buoyant,” said BESA’s chief executive officer David Frise. “Judging from the comments made in our report by company directors and senior business figures, the outlook is generally optimistic despite the considerable financial, technical and regulatory hurdles they are having to navigate.”
He added that, while the long-term impact of the global market turmoil unleashed by Donald Trump’s tariffs remained uncertain, the best performing M&E engineering businesses covered in the BESA report were “remaining calm in the face of this latest ‘bump in the road’”.
GHCS/GH Engage managing director Gokhan Hassan said that new business models and subtle shifts in the industry’s supply chains could insulate parts of the sector from the worst impacts of global economic conditions.
“There is a growing spirit across the sector that goes beyond simple ‘resilience’,” he said. “However, a trade war was the last thing anyone needed coming so soon after the collapse of ISG and the inflationary pressures created by Brexit and the war in Ukraine.”
Several companies told BESA’s researchers that they were now operating outside ‘traditional’ M&E sector boundaries and finding specialist markets that placed a greater value on high quality engineering services and are less vulnerable to short-term financial shocks.
The fact that the UK has also become something of a ‘services superpower’ also helped to insulate it from the full impact of US tariffs which were primarily aimed at trade surpluses in manufactured goods, the report found.
“The specialist building engineering sector has some significant advantages because of its ability to add value in sectors that are largely ‘recession proof’,” said Hassan.
“These include data centres, which are now receiving another huge boost from the growth in AI, pharmaceutical production and research facilities, life sciences laboratories, energy transition, and defence.”
The BESA report found that, not only are these sectors continuing to build with confidence, but they are also heavily reliant on high value M&E engineering to provide clean rooms, resilient cooling systems, water and energy efficiency, etc. In many such facilities, the services represent upwards of 60% of the value of the overall project and, in a growing number, the M&E provider is taking the role of lead contractor.
While mainstream construction has been hit badly by delayed investment and rising costs, not helped by April’s rise in employers’ National Insurance deductions, parts of the sector are finding ways to operate outside traditional boundaries and secure higher margin work, the report found.
“This trend is also upending the traditional supply chain structure that has characterised construction for decades and which is, in large part, responsible for repeated failures to deliver projects on time, to budget, safely and sustainably,” said BESA’s membership director Rebecca Fox.
