IN Brief:
- Hub East Central Scotland's £1.2bn portfolio includes £843m of completed and operational public infrastructure.
- Projects worth £191m are under construction, with another £250m progressing through development.
- The organisation reports a £1.5bn longer-term pipeline alongside employment, training, and SME procurement activity.
hub East Central Scotland has reported a £1.2bn portfolio of public infrastructure investment, including £191m of projects under construction and a further £250m moving through development.
The organisation’s 2025-26 annual report puts the value of completed and operational facilities at £843m, while its longer-term development pipeline stands at £1.5bn. The figures cover a programme extending across schools, leisure and wellbeing facilities, community buildings, and other public assets.
Current projects highlighted in the report include the £77m Caledonia High School, the £65m Alloa Wellbeing Hub and Lochies School, the £21m Callander Primary School, and the £12m Templehall Community Hub.
The portfolio includes assets at markedly different stages rather than a single prospective pipeline. Hundreds of millions of pounds of work are already open, another tranche is physically under construction, and the development programme contains projects still progressing through design, business-case, and procurement activity.
That spread provides more useful workload visibility than a headline pipeline figure on its own. Projects in development can fall away or change scope before construction, whereas the £191m already on site represents work that has crossed the principal approval and procurement barriers.
Callander Primary School is among the schemes to have moved through completion. The school opened to pupils in September and provides capacity for 317 children as part of the wider community campus alongside McLaren High School, Callander Nursery, and McLaren Leisure Centre.
At the other end of the programme, the Alloa Wellbeing Hub and Lochies School remains a major live construction project. The development combines leisure and community facilities with specialist education provision, bringing together swimming pools, sports spaces, classrooms, specialist learning facilities, public areas, and external works within one scheme.
The variety of asset types creates a broad contractor and consultant requirement. School and leisure projects share many core construction disciplines, but their servicing, acoustics, specialist equipment, public access, safeguarding, commissioning, and operational requirements can differ substantially.
The annual report also measures employment and supplier outcomes generated alongside physical construction. Hub projects supported 158 local jobs during the year and delivered 1,231 apprenticeship weeks and 1,377 weeks of training on site, together with 2,192 hours of careers advice and educational engagement.
Supplier participation remains another feature of the model. Hub East Central Scotland reports that 55% of SMEs involved in its projects were based within the territory and 90% were Scottish SMEs.
Those figures sit alongside programmes intended to improve access to public construction opportunities. Meet the Buyer events and the Build Fife initiative are being used to introduce businesses to procurement requirements, with the Build Fife model expected to be extended elsewhere in the region.
Repeated public-sector programmes can give smaller contractors and suppliers greater visibility than isolated tenders, although each package still has to be competed under the applicable procurement route. A pipeline across multiple councils also provides more opportunity to carry skills and lessons from one project into the next.
Hub East Central Scotland operates across Fife, Stirling, Clackmannanshire, Falkirk, Perth and Kinross, and Angus, working with public-sector partners to develop and deliver community infrastructure. Its role covers project development and management rather than simply acting as the end client for every building.
That development function is reflected in £3.78m committed through enabling funds. The organisation uses the funding to help public bodies progress emerging projects through work that can include feasibility studies and other early technical activity.
One example is a Fife Council study considering potential solar installations across 60 sites. The programme sits outside conventional building construction but illustrates how comparatively small development allocations can create the evidence required before a larger capital package is defined.
Early-stage funding often determines whether public projects reach procurement. Surveys, options work, business cases, technical design, planning, and cost development require expenditure well before a main contractor appears on site, and constrained public budgets can leave otherwise viable proposals unable to move beyond an initial concept.
The £250m identified as being in development is therefore an important part of the workload picture. It represents schemes closer to becoming construction opportunities than the wider £1.5bn pipeline, but still exposed to funding, approval, scope, and procurement decisions.
The larger pipeline provides a longer view rather than a guaranteed order book. Its conversion rate will depend on public capital programmes, affordability, changing service requirements, and whether individual projects establish viable business cases.
For the regional supply chain, the distinction between operational, live, development, and pipeline values helps separate secured construction activity from more speculative future demand. The current £191m under construction provides immediate workload, while the £250m development programme determines the next group of schemes likely to move towards procurement.
Social-value requirements will continue alongside those capital programmes. Employment, apprenticeships, training, and SME participation are embedded in the hub model, which means contractor performance is assessed across more than cost, programme, and the physical condition of the completed asset.
The £1.2bn portfolio shows that the model has reached considerable scale across east central Scotland. Its next test is conversion: moving enough of the £250m development programme into construction to replace projects reaching completion, while advancing credible schemes from the £1.5bn longer-term pipeline behind them.
