IN Brief:
- Akela Construction has secured four Scottish residential groundworks packages worth a combined £13.9m.
- The contracts support 268 homes at Tranent, Dolphingstone, Uphall, and Arden.
- Works include earthworks, drainage, roads, foundations, plotworks, a pumping station, rising main, and flood-compensation infrastructure.
Akela Construction has secured four Scottish residential groundworks packages worth a combined £13.9m, adding secured workload across 268 private, affordable, and social homes in East Lothian, West Lothian, and Glasgow.
The largest award is a £5m package from Barratt Homes at Tranent, where Akela is delivering earthworks, drainage, and plotworks for 101 private homes. Work began in December 2025 and is scheduled to continue until December 2027, giving the contractor a two-year programme across successive phases of the development.
Taylor Wimpey East has awarded a further £3.9m package at Dolphingstone Phase 3 in East Lothian. The contract covers earthworks, drainage, and plotworks for 73 private homes and also began in December 2025, with completion currently planned for August 2028.
In Uphall, West Lothian, Akela has secured a £4m groundworks contract from Dundas Estates for a mixed development of 75 private and affordable homes. The scope extends beyond plot preparation to road construction, foundations, floor slabs, hard landscaping, a dedicated pumping station, and a rising main, with completion due in February 2028.
The fourth contract is a £1m package for AS Homes in Arden, Glasgow, supporting the delivery of 19 social homes. Work started in March 2026 and includes earthworks, drainage, foundations and slabs, hard landscaping, road infrastructure, and an off-site flood-compensation area. Completion is scheduled for March 2027.
Together, the four awards give Akela work across different housing tenures and development stages, but the common requirement is early infrastructure that allows the housebuilding programme to progress. Ground levels, drainage routes, roads, foundations, and utilities have to be delivered in the sequence required for plots to pass efficiently to superstructure trades.
That sequencing is particularly important on phased residential sites. Civil engineering teams need enough workface to operate plant and maintain productivity, while housebuilders generally want infrastructure released in line with sales, handover, and cash-flow requirements rather than completed too far ahead of the build programme.
Drainage can become one of the controlling elements. Pipe levels, attenuation, outfalls, pumping arrangements, and connections to existing networks influence road construction and plot levels, while late changes can force completed groundworks to be reopened or delay the release of foundations.
The Uphall package illustrates that dependency through its dedicated pumping station and rising main. Pumped drainage requires civil, mechanical, electrical, and control elements to be coordinated with the wider site infrastructure, together with access for future operation and maintenance.
At Arden, the off-site flood-compensation area introduces another interface beyond the immediate housing plots. Flood-management works need to match the approved drainage and development strategy, with levels, storage capacity, earthworks, and connections completed in a sequence that supports rather than restricts later construction.
Roads and hard landscaping carry similar programme considerations. Temporary construction traffic can damage finished surfaces if permanent works are completed too early, while leaving roads too late can restrict access for follow-on trades and residents as early phases approach handover.
The contractor therefore has to balance permanent and temporary requirements throughout each scheme. Haul routes, drainage protection, temporary crossings, material storage, welfare, and plant movements continue alongside infrastructure that may already have reached its final specification.
Akela operates across residential infrastructure, civil engineering, and energy work, with ground engineering and infrastructure capability spanning earthworks, drainage, foundations, roads, structures, and utilities. The four housing awards give that capacity a relatively long forward programme, with three of the packages extending into 2028.
That duration creates its own resource challenge. Supervisory teams, engineers, operators, and plant have to be distributed between several developments whose busiest periods may overlap, while each housebuilder retains its own programme, commercial requirements, and standards.
Material procurement also needs to follow the individual phasing rather than the £13.9m pipeline as a single workload. Drainage products, stone, concrete, reinforcement, road materials, pumping equipment, and other infrastructure components will be required at different points across four sites, and changes to one client programme should not disrupt another.
The awards arrive against a housing market that remains uneven at national level, but they demonstrate that individual developments continue to generate substantial early-works demand where planning, infrastructure, finance, and sales expectations support construction.
For Akela, the contract total is therefore less important than converting those awards into predictable plot delivery over the next two years. Groundworks sit at the front of the housing construction sequence, and delays at that stage tend to travel through every trade that follows.
The immediate workload now spans four active programmes, from the smaller social-housing package at Arden to longer private and mixed-tenure developments in East and West Lothian. Maintaining drainage, road, foundation, and plot releases against each client’s build sequence will determine whether the £13.9m pipeline translates into reliable construction progress.
