Which projects are likely to have the biggest impact on the industry in the year ahead?
Tribeca
Work on London’s largest purpose-built life sciences campus will ramp up in 2025.
The first phase of the King’s Cross Tribeca project, which features state-of-the-art laboratories and workshops, saw VolkerFitzpatrick complete the 10,450 square metre Apex building for £29m in 2024. Tenants on site include the London BioScience Innovation Centre.
Ardmore has since started on three other buildings – the Reflector, the Assembly and the Connector – comprising a total
of 49,900 square metres. The second-phase deal for these buildings is worth £236m, with the work due to complete in 2026.
Tribeca is one of many life sciences developments underway across the UK. The sector has boomed in recent years, driven by both public and private sector research and development.
Lower Thames Crossing
After 15 years of planning, will this be the year that approval is finally granted for the £10bn Lower Thames Crossing?
Plans from Highways England (now National Highways) were submitted for the Kent to Essex river tunnel in 2020 but then withdrawn, before being revised and resubmitted in October 2022. The development consent order process has been stuck in limbo since. In October 2024, transport secretary Louise Haigh put off the deadline for a decision on its application until May 2025 “to allow more time for the application to be considered further”.
How the scheme will be funded is not known but should become clearer when the Treasury’s 10-year infrastructure strategy is published alongside phase two of its Spending Review in the spring.
A Bouygues Travaux Publics/Murphy joint venture won the tunnelling contract in 2023, while Skanska and Balfour Beatty are in line to build new connecting roads, if the project goes ahead.
HS2’s Euston Station
The government finally confirmed approval for the main HS2 London terminal in October. But big questions remain about the scheme, not least how the funds will be raised to pay for it.
In the Autumn Budget, chancellor Rachel Reeves confirmed public money would pay
for tunnelling work to begin from Old Oak Common to Euston. She added that the expansion would “catalyse private investment into the local area”.
Treasury documents state that a Euston Housing Delivery Group – first proposed by then prime minister Rishi Sunak in March – will be established to “drive forward an ambitious housing and regeneration initiative for the local area”.
What this looks like in practice remains to be seen.
Havant Thicket Reservoir
Work on the first new UK reservoir in decades will step up a notch this year.
The project is designed to boost water supplies in the busy South East of England. After its 2029 completion, the reservoir will hold around 8.7 billion litres of water in total and be able to supply up to 21 million litres every day. Works will also see a new wetland created on the northern shore.
The Future Water MJJV, made up of contractors Jones Bros Civil Engineering and Mackley, was appointed to a £167m main contract by clients Portsmouth Water and Southern Water in 2023. Ward & Burke Construction is also delivering a £41m pipeline.
Earthworks and ground improvements will be the focus of 2025, before above-ground construction starts in 2026.
The water industry is planning three other new reservoirs: one in Abingdon costing up to £2.2bn, and two for the £5bn Fens and Lincoln reservoirs project, with a contract due to be awarded in 2027.
New Hospital Programme
A government review into the £20bn New Hospital Programme is due to be published in 2025. But its focus has already shifted from building 32 new hospitals by 2030 to addressing those left structurally unsafe due to reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC).
Chancellor Rachel Reeves said in her Autumn Budget speech that the seven hospitals containing RAAC would be prioritised under the project. The National Audit Office warned in late 2023 that those facilities might be forced to close before they can be rebuilt.
A total of £1bn has been allocated to fix the backlog of maintenance, repairs and upgrades across the NHS estate in the next year. But NHS trust leaders warn that closer to £14bn is required, and have called for clarity as soon as possible on which non-RAAC-hit hospitals will be replaced.
Sizewell C
With the majority of the existing fleet of nuclear power plants about to be switched off and only Hinkley Point C under construction as a replacement, the future of Sizewell C is a key part of increasing the role nuclear plays in the UK’s energy mix.
The scheme received a boost in May when the Supreme Court threw out a legal challenge over its effect on water supplies in the Suffolk coastal area, but questions over its funding remain.
Whitehall hopes to attract enough private investment to build the project but also committed a £5.5bn subsidy to delivering it in September. That was on top of £1.3bn for initial infrastructure works, £170m for site preparation plus £679m in 2022 for its first stake in the project.
Autumn Budget documents said a final investment decision on whether to proceed with Sizewell C will be taken at the Spending Review in the spring.
New homes
Labour’s ambitious aim to deliver 1.5 million new homes during the course of this parliament is one of its biggest tasks.
Key to its efforts is the Planning and Infrastructure Bill – designed to make the approvals process quicker – which it hopes to make
law in 2025. The government is also set to update the National Planning Policy Framework to give local authorities new mandatory housing targets, and recruit 300 new planning officers.
The Affordable Homes Programme has also been boosted by £500m to support social and affordable projects, and £3bn of support has been offered to SMEs in housing guarantee schemes.
But industry figures have warned that a shortage of construction workers, especially skilled ones, could slow growth ambitions. Others have raised concerns over a lack of schemes to help first-time buyers and the impact of the increase in employer National Insurance contributions on housebuilding businesses.
Eastern Greenlink 2
The Eastern Greenlink 2 is a 525kV, 2GW high voltage direct current (HVDC) electrical “superhighway” subsea cable link running between Aberdeenshire and North Yorkshire.
When complete in 2029, it will be the longest HVDC cable in the UK and the UK’s single largest ever electricity transmission project, providing enough electricity to power 2 million homes.
Hitachi Energy and Bam Nuttall began preconstruction work on the £4.3bn scheme in September 2024 for clients National Grid and Scottish & Southern Electricity Networks.
The contractors are providing engineering works and technology for the HVDC converter stations that form the terminals for the HVDC cable, converting direct current to alternating current, which is used in the onshore transmission network.
Eden Project Dundee
A former Dundee gasworks is set to become a landmark destination for green tourism, as a new Eden Project is developed in the city.
The scheme, which was granted planning permission in June, aims to combine horticulture, exhibits, live music, art, food
and retail spaces across three large and three smaller buildings.
Plans include a ‘Gathering Meadows’ for outdoor events holding up to 6,000 people, a water feature running across the site, a forest of new trees and an existing retaining wall becoming ‘The Great Living Wall’.
The charity, famous for its Cornwall site, is carrying out design work and fundraising for the project. It does not have a construction or procurement timeline in place yet, a spokesperson told Construction News.
Other Eden Projects are also in either planning or development in Lancashire, Northern Ireland, Australia and China.
8 Canada Square
The iconic HSBC tower in London’s Docklands will radically change once the banking giant leaves the area in 2027.
Clients Qatar Investment Authority and Canary Wharf Group plan to retrofit the 102,200 square metre building into a mixed-use project featuring workspaces, leisure, entertainment, education and cultural attractions, with “unparalleled sustainability credentials”.
The east London financial district has increasingly pivoted towards leisure uses in recent years, as demand for offices has fallen in the post-pandemic era.
As we move into 2025, a planning application for the mega-scheme is awaited, as is news of which contractor will land the job.
