What happened

Anglian Water has appointed Barhale, working through the @one Alliance, to build a £14.6m twin pumped rising main at Alconbury Weald near Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire. The 7,460m wastewater pipeline will be laid largely by open-cut construction around the eastern side of Huntingdon, with horizontal directional drilling used to cross beneath the East Coast Main Line and the River Great Ouse. Reported this week by New Civil Engineer and The Construction Index, the project will provide the wastewater network capacity needed for the former RAF Alconbury site, which has planning permission for 6,200 homes. Handover is scheduled for November 2027.

Why it matters

AMP8 investment continues to put water infrastructure work on the books well into 2027 and beyond, even as other parts of construction, notably housebuilding, pull back. Alconbury Weald is one of the larger strategic housing sites in Cambridgeshire, and this pipeline is the enabling infrastructure that has to go in before the bulk of those 6,200 homes can be built out, so it is also an early signal of where housebuilding activity in the East of England is heading over the next few years. Cambridgeshire and the wider Oxford-Cambridge corridor have been earmarked for sustained growth, and enabling infrastructure like this typically arrives twelve to eighteen months ahead of the housebuilders themselves mobilising on site.

What it means for careers and hiring

Specialist skills are the story here. Horizontal directional drilling experience, particularly crossings under live rail lines and rivers, is scarce and well rewarded. Site engineers and supervisors who can point to HDD crossing work on their CV are in a strong position across the water sector right now, not just on this scheme.

More broadly, site management, groundworkers and utilities QSs in the Huntingdon and Cambridgeshire area should see a lift in demand as this project mobilises towards its November 2027 handover. For QSs and engineers looking to move out of housebuilding-exposed roles and into a sector with clearer visibility, AMP8 framework work of this kind, delivered through alliances like @one, offers longer-dated job security than most private housing-led contracts can currently promise. It is also worth watching Anglian Water's wider AMP8 programme for further enabling and network-capacity contracts feeding the same East of England growth corridor.