Morgan Sindall Construction half year highlights - August 2024

Half year highlights

We’re proud to have played our part in Morgan Sindall Group’s half year results, which were posted on 8 August 2024.

The Group delivered another record set of results in the first half, once again reflecting the high quality of its operations and the talent and commitment of its people.

Group revenue increased by 14% to £2.2bn, adjusted operating profit before tax was up 17% to £70.1m and the interim dividend up 15% to 41.5 pence per share.

The Group’s balance sheet remains strong with net cash of £351m, and together with its high-quality secured order book of £8.7bn, the Group is well-positioned for the future.

In Construction, we’ve made hugely positive progress as part of our Responsible Business strategy and have highlighted some of the achievements of our talented people below:

Mental health and wellbeing

Our approach to mental health and wellbeing is comprehensive and multifaceted, focusing on promoting overall wellness through prevention, support, and intervention. Activities taking place range from local office and project health screenings, awareness events and insightful discussion on neurodiversity, pride, healthy eating and exercise, men and women’s health and PTSD with experienced guest speakers, something we’ve also enhanced nationally with a series of online webinars.

To date the business has 204 Mental Health First Aiders (an increase of 64 from August 2023). The team are available to our employees or our supply chain to assist with any health and wellbeing matters. The team are supported by our in-house Mental Health First Aid trainers who will have delivered three training sessions by the end of the year to increase our network. Two of our trainers, Chris and Drew, took part in a discussion as part of Mental Health Awareness Week in May.

Further development of our people-friendly policies

We updated our parental leave, flexible working, carers, compassionate and emergency leave policies, as well as guidance on fertility and pregnancy and baby loss. Our work is always ongoing in this area as we respond to feedback from our teams and in the Autumn we’ll be updating our Reservists, Foster Carers and Volunteering policies.

We know everyone has different needs when faced with a range of life moments, as well as understanding that traditional ways of working no longer suit everyone. If you’re looking for a role in Construction, take a look at the vacancies on our website.

More recently, our team in Cambridge celebrated their team spirit and approach to their work in this video, hear from some of the people behind the projects.

We’re open to challenge on our green claims

Greenwashing is becoming commonplace in our everyday lives, with many examples of enhanced claims that falsify information for customers.

We created our Green Claims Policy and signed a partnership with the Anti-Greenwash Charter, which sets out the standards at which we manage our information in line with anti-greenwashing policies.

The policy can be found on the Governance page of our website.

We’ve removed 38,097 tonnes of carbon to date from our projects

Our 10 Tonne Challenge in July brought our total carbon savings to date to 38,097 tonnes, bringing us closer to our 50,000 target by the end of 2025. Our teams continue to utilise CarboniCa, our externally-verified carbon measurement tool to consider the materials and processes on our projects and the impact they have on the environment.

Here we’ve shared some of the example savings collected by our teams and supply chain.

Welcoming new starters as part of our early careers programmes

In Autumn of 2023 we had 64 people join us as part of one of our trainee, apprentice or graduate schemes. Since January we’ve also welcomed a further 30 people into our teams too as part of our early careers programmes. We’re also preparing for our next intake who will arrive in September 2024.

Here, our apprentices have shared some of their experiences of joining the business for those interested in a career in construction – take a look below.

Delivering social value into our communities

Our teams are well versed in the needs of their local communities and at the beginning of a project will work with our customers to translate their social value goals into meaningful outcomes.

A recent example of this is our Acklam Road project in London, which is being delivered by the Southern Construction Framework (SCF); where partnerships between ourselves, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, AlManeer- Muslim Culture & Heritage Centre, The Children’s Book Project, Metropolitan Police, Morley College and the Construction Youth Trust and more led to the outcomes in this report.

A further example is Ravensdale SEND School, which is being delivered in Nottinghamshire for the SCAPE framework. The £16.2m project has been onsite since April 2024, and has already delivered £1.6 million in social value via outputs such as 18 hours of volunteering, 26 apprenticeship weeks supported, 75% local spend and 38% local labour (both within 20 miles) and 93% SME spend.