M Group replaces Balfour Beatty: highways contract model shift for project teams
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Herefordshire Council has awarded M Group Highways a public realm services contract from June 2026, replacing Balfour Beatty for highway maintenance, drainage, street lighting, winter maintenance and associated public realm tasks. The council will internalise asset management, network management, highways inspections, design and project management, customer services and fleet management, with M Group paid on specified work at agreed rates rather than a fully outsourced model. Locality stewards will transfer from Balfour Beatty to the council, inspecting roads and defining work packages for the new contractor, tightening client control over scope and spend.
Technical Brief
- Scope bundles highways, drainage, street lighting, street cleaning, parks vegetation, bus shelters, public art and rights of way.
- Winter maintenance explicitly included, so M Group must integrate gritting, snow clearance and associated plant logistics.
- Bereavement services and cemetery grounds maintenance sit within the same public realm package, affecting resource planning.
- Separation of inspection/definition (council) from execution (M Group) creates a clear client–contractor technical interface.
- Rate‑based specified work model will require detailed bills of quantities, standard details and robust job coding.
- Similar hybrid models in UK highways often enable tighter performance management but demand stronger in‑house engineering capacity.
Our Take
Among the 495 Infrastructure stories in our database, UK local-authority highways contracts like Herefordshire’s often precede wider regional frameworks, so M Group Highways’ entry here could position it for neighbouring shire and combined-authority work post-2026.
Balfour Beatty’s loss of the Herefordshire highways slot fits a pattern in our coverage of tier-one contractors selectively stepping back from lower-margin local roads maintenance, which can open space for groups like M Group to scale in medium-sized councils.
With the contract transition not until June 2026, Herefordshire Council has an unusually long mobilisation window compared with many Contract Award items in our database, which should allow more extensive asset-condition surveys and data handover before M Group takes over network stewardship.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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