Contract award
Mears secures £1.4bn of work and reports £4.2bn pipeline
By Staff Writer | 12 August 2026
A £450m Birmingham City Council contract leads £1.4bn of new housing maintenance work, as the group reports a forward pipeline of £4.2bn and a fall in adjusted profit.
Mears has secured £1.4bn of new housing maintenance work and reported a forward pipeline of £4.2bn. The group said it remained on track to meet full-year expectations after winning two major new clients and defending a series of long-term maintenance contracts.
The largest new award is at Birmingham City Council, a 10-year contract worth £450m covering responsive repairs, voids, gas servicing, heating installations and planned maintenance.
A second 10-year deal, worth £150m, was secured with Rooftop Housing Group, covering repairs and maintenance to 7,000 homes across South Worcestershire and North Gloucestershire.
The margin story behind the order intake
Adjusted pre-tax profit fell 10 per cent to £29m on revenue of £560m. Margins narrowed to 5.2 per cent from 5.6 per cent, which the group attributed to the cost of starting new contracts.
That combination, record order intake alongside compressed margin, is characteristic of the mobilisation phase in housing maintenance. New contracts of this length carry front-loaded costs in recruitment, fleet, systems and stock before the revenue stabilises, and the margin recovers only once the operation settles.
Mears has continued to make strong progress against its key strategic objectives.
Lucas Critchley, chief executive, Mears
Retention as well as growth
Alongside the new work, the group retained major maintenance partnerships with Cross Keys Homes, Livin, Leeds City Council, Moat Homes and Thurrock Council, which together contributed more than £1bn of fresh orders.
For the supply chain, a 10-year responsive repairs contract of this size is a long and relatively predictable stream of work, and the mobilisation window is when subcontract terms are set. Those terms, particularly around response times and liquidated remedies for missed appointments, are where the risk in this sector actually sits.
What the retained work signals
Retention matters as much as new wins in this sector. Maintaining partnerships with Cross Keys Homes, Livin, Leeds City Council, Moat Homes and Thurrock Council contributed more than £1bn of fresh orders without the mobilisation cost that accompanies a new client, which is why retention protects margin in a way that new work does not.
The Birmingham contract covers responsive repairs, voids, gas servicing, heating installations and planned maintenance. That breadth means a single contract spanning emergency call-out work, statutory servicing and programmed capital works, each with different performance measures and different subcontract structures beneath it.
Ten-year terms of this length also carry indexation and change mechanisms that decide whether the later years are profitable. Those provisions, rather than the headline value, are where the commercial outcome of a contract like this is actually settled.