What happened

Sefton Metropolitan Borough Council has awarded its highways and footways maintenance contract to Dowhigh, a Bootle-based civils SME, Construction News reported this week. The deal, procured under the Procurement Act 2023, is valued at £54m over its initial term and up to £64.8m including VAT if all three optional 12-month extensions are taken up, running from December 2026 through to December 2034 at the outside.

Five contractors tendered, with Huyton Asphalt Civils the other firm through to the final stage. The contract covers reactive footway repairs, highway trial pits, utility searches, pump maintenance and an out-of-hours call-out service requiring attendance within an hour of being contacted.

Why it matters

This is a local authority handing a genuinely sizeable, multi-year maintenance contract to a regional SME rather than one of the national highways framework contractors. That's worth noticing on its own. Highways maintenance work is unglamorous compared with a big rail or nuclear programme, but it's exactly the kind of long-term, recession-resistant workload that keeps a regional business, and its supply chain, in steady employment for the best part of a decade. An eight-year potential term with performance-linked extensions also tells you the council wants continuity, not a contractor it has to re-tender for every three years.

For the wider North West market, it's a reminder that highways maintenance hasn't gone quiet even while housing and speculative commercial starts have. Councils still have statutory duties to keep roads and footways safe, and that work doesn't disappear in a downturn the way discretionary development does.

What it means for your career

If you're a civils or highways professional in Merseyside or the wider North West, Dowhigh's win is worth watching. An SME picking up a contract of this size, with an out-of-hours response requirement built in, typically needs to scale its supervisory and commercial bench fast: site agents, contracts managers and estimators who can manage a term maintenance book rather than a single project. That's a different discipline from project-based construction, and it's one that's chronically short of good people because most training pushes people towards projects, not maintenance frameworks.

More broadly, this is a useful data point for anyone assessing career risk right now. Term maintenance contracts, with local authorities as the client, tend to be more stable through a downturn than speculative development. If your current employer's workload is weighted towards discretionary private schemes, a business with a strong maintenance and framework book, like Dowhigh's now is, is worth a look, particularly if you're commercially minded and comfortable with the KPI-driven, performance-extension structure that increasingly defines this end of the market under the Procurement Act 2023.