Portsmouth Water has appointed Clancy to deliver the next stage of the Havant Thicket Reservoir project, a £26.84m contract covering a pumping station at Farlington and an 8.5km pipeline between the treatment works and the reservoir site, with work starting in December.

Havant Thicket is the first major reservoir built in the UK in more than 30 years, a joint project between Portsmouth Water and Southern Water that will eventually hold 8.7 billion litres and help protect the River Test and River Itchen, two of Hampshire's chalk streams, from over-abstraction. The new pipeline Clancy is building will be capable of moving up to 32.4 million litres of water a day. The whole scheme is due to complete in 2029, with this latest phase scheduled to finish in early 2030.

Why it matters

Reservoirs of this scale do not come along often, and the drought summers of the last few years have made the case for new raw water storage hard to ignore. Water companies are under pressure from Ofwat and from government to show they are investing bill money in resilience rather than just patching leaks, and Havant Thicket is the flagship example regulators and ministers point to when asked what that investment looks like on the ground.

For contractors, the award also shows how water infrastructure work keeps being broken into discrete, multi-million-pound packages rather than one mega-contract, which gives mid-sized specialists like Clancy a route into nationally significant projects that would otherwise go straight to the tier ones.

What it means for your career

This is steady, multi-year water sector work rather than a single hiring spike. Clancy will need pipeline and civils project managers, groundworkers and pumping station M&E specialists through to the 2030 completion date, concentrated in Hampshire but drawing on the wider south east water workforce. For quantity surveyors and site managers with NEC experience in the water sector, this is a useful reminder that the regulated utilities, water, in particular, are one of the few parts of construction still signing multi-year contracts while housing and general building output keeps falling.

If you are weighing a move away from a housebuilder or general contractor into infrastructure, water company supply chains like Clancy's are worth a look: the work is less glamorous than a grid substation or a hospital, but it is reliably funded through regulated price controls, which makes it a sensible place to ride out a soft general building market.