By Kristy Dorsey
Council-backed construction services group City Building has highlighted the strength of its forward order book following a year in which operations were severely hampered by lockdown restrictions.
Both of the group’s two component businesses recorded a reduction in turnover for the year to March 31, and there was no distribution of cash to members. In the previous year, City Building returned a total of £7.7 million to Glasgow City Council and social housing provider Wheatley Group.
City Building (Contracts) is wholly-owned by the council, while City Building (Glasgow) was set up in 2017 as a 30-year joint venture owned equally by the council and Wheatley Group. Wheatley owns or manages more than 93,000 homes across 19 local authorities in Scotland.
READ MORE: City Building puts £7.7m into Glasgow coffers
City Building (Glasgow) provides repairs, maintenance and investment work to Wheatly, and saw its turnover fall to £105.7m against £142.6m previously. The contracts division – which undertakes work for the council and delivers construction, repair and maintenance contracts – posted revenues of £45.8m, down from £65.2m the year before.
The group went into lockdown on March 23 of last year, with all but emergency repair services coming to a halt. However, operations have resumed in line with easing restrictions, with £20m of new contracts recently secured.
“Despite the difficulties over the last financial year, we have a very strong order book which will help us build back the business and potentially exceed our operational targets for the next financial year,” executive director Alan Burns said.
READ MORE: Building the future with construction apprenticeships
“During the pandemic we took the opportunity to undergo a digital transformation that enabled new flexible working practices and will continue to deliver improvement across our businesses. We also progressed our plans to construct a new college for our apprenticeship programme, which is the biggest of its kind in Scotland, and we’re seeking to upskill our wider workforce as we embrace renewable technologies in collaboration with our stakeholders and supply chain.”
City Building (Contracts) claimed £3.1m in furlough payments during the year, plus a further £4.4m payment from the council to cover “temporary” price increases generated by the need for extra security and equipment, and to cover fixed overheads. City Building (Glasgow) claimed £10.2m from the job retention scheme and received £2.9m to cover temporary price increases.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel