IN Brief:
- Government has signed the contract allowing the first phase of work to begin on a new prison beside HMP Garth and HMP Wymott.
- Laing O’Rourke's platform-DfMA model includes around 12,000 precast components and extensive utilities and logistics preparation.
- The Ministry of Justice is accelerating prison capacity while targeting 14,000 additional places nationally by 2031.
Laing O’Rourke is starting enabling works for a new prison beside HMP Garth and HMP Wymott in Lancashire after the Ministry of Justice signed the contract for the first phase of construction.
The government describes the planned facility as a roughly 1,700-place prison, while Laing O’Rourke’s current project information specifies 1,650 additional places. The figures remain different across the two official sources, but both place the scheme among the major new-build components of the prison capacity programme.
The contractor is delivering the project as an Alliance for New Prisons member, using a platform-based design for manufacture and assembly strategy developed across the Ministry of Justice programme. Laing O’Rourke lists approximately 41,000m² of accommodation and around 12,000 precast components to be supplied through its specialist manufacturing operations.
Those components include precast columns, slabs, walls, façade panels, and riser modules. Repeating established houseblock elements allows more of the structural work to be manufactured away from site, but the installation programme still depends on foundations, utilities, logistics, survey information, and interfaces with an operating prison estate being resolved in the correct sequence.
Laing O’Rourke gives the enabling programme as 76 weeks, followed by 183 weeks of main works, with peak site numbers expected to reach around 1,200. Those durations indicate the scale of preparation needed before the accommodation programme reaches full production rather than treating enabling works as a short demolition exercise.
Utilities are one of the more difficult interfaces. The contractor has created a master tracker covering existing and proposed services, supported by surveys and digital modelling of below-ground infrastructure. Around 1km of deep drainage is planned using directional drilling, avoiding an open-cut route that would create greater disruption to prison and construction operations.
The live setting governs other parts of the construction strategy. HMP Garth is an operating Category B men’s prison and neighbouring HMP Wymott is a Category C establishment, so construction has to progress without interrupting services or compromising security at either site. Work close to existing prison boundaries requires escorts, while interfaces with local residents add further restrictions to logistics and working methods.
Laing O’Rourke has established a new logistics route and welfare facilities on third-party land to reduce pressure on the existing prisons and surrounding community. Traffic management and deliveries will have to support large volumes of manufactured components as the programme develops, making access planning inseparable from the DfMA model used for the buildings themselves.
The Ministry of Justice announcement sits within a wider £110 million acceleration package drawn from existing budgets. The funding will support faster delivery of additional prison places, including conversion of unused offices, laundry rooms, and storage areas within existing establishments, as well as land purchases intended to create a pipeline of future prison sites.
Government is targeting 14,000 additional places by 2031 and says more than 3,200 have been delivered during the past two years. That national target covers several forms of construction, from converted internal space and additional houseblocks to complete new prisons, so progress cannot be measured solely by the number of major new-build schemes entering the market.
At Lancashire, however, the construction challenge is unusually concentrated. A large manufactured building programme is being inserted beside two operating secure establishments, with deep drainage, utilities, boundary restrictions, logistics, precast production, and building assembly all feeding into the same programme.
DfMA reduces some repetition once production is established, particularly where houseblock designs and precast components can be standardised across several projects. It also moves more decisions earlier in the programme: dimensions, services interfaces, penetrations, and tolerances need to be sufficiently mature before factory production, because correcting repeated components after manufacture can erase the programme advantages the method is intended to provide.
The first contract therefore releases more than preparatory activity. Enabling works have to establish the physical and operational conditions in which the subsequent 183-week main programme can run at scale, including the routes, services, drainage, security interfaces, and working areas required for thousands of manufactured components and a four-figure peak workforce.
The government’s capacity target extends to 2031, but the Lancashire programme now has nearer-term construction measures against which it can be judged. Completion of utilities, logistics infrastructure, drainage, and the 76-week enabling phase will determine whether the repeatable houseblock strategy can reach the production rate required when the main works move into full delivery.
