What happened

Darwin Group, the modular healthcare specialist owned by Portakabin, has pulled back from chasing large, complex NHS building schemes after a run of cost overruns hit its books hard. Construction News reported this week that turnover at the Telford-based firm nearly halved to £72m in 2025, down from £140m the year before. Darwin swung from an £8.6m operating profit to a £5m operating loss, with directors pointing to several large permanent modular healthcare projects that ran into delivery problems and cost overruns during the year.

Portakabin bought Darwin in 2023 specifically to expand its healthcare offer, betting on the government's push to build hospitals faster using modern methods of construction. Average employee numbers at the firm fell from 200 to 174 over the year, and the contracts workforce dropped from 172 to 145. The directors' response, laid out in the accounts, is a retreat towards smaller, less complex modular buildings and Portakabin's hire business, rather than chasing the biggest permanent healthcare contracts.

Why it matters

Offsite manufacture has been sold to government and industry alike as the fix for a hospital building programme that needs to move faster than traditional procurement allows. Darwin's numbers are a reminder that modular construction does not remove risk from a project, it just moves where the risk sits. Complex permanent healthcare buildings still carry the design coordination, commissioning and handover challenges of any hospital scheme, and a factory-based delivery model magnifies the cost of getting that wrong, because problems discovered on site can mean rework back at the factory as well.

For the New Hospital Programme and the wider push towards MMC in health estates, this is a data point worth watching rather than a reason to write off offsite construction. But it does suggest the market is settling into two distinct tiers: high-volume, standardised hire and simple buildings, where the model works reliably, and bespoke permanent healthcare schemes, where the economics are still being worked out the hard way.

What it means for your career

If you work in offsite manufacture, commercial or project management on healthcare schemes, Darwin's retreat is a signal to look closely at which segment of the business is actually growing before you move. Roles tied to bespoke, high-value permanent modular hospital projects carry more delivery risk right now than roles on standardised hire and smaller-building work, where headcount has held up better. Quantity surveyors and commercial managers with experience managing cost overruns and design changes on complex offsite schemes are in more demand than ever, precisely because firms need people who can catch these problems before they reach Darwin's scale. If you are interviewing with a modular healthcare specialist, ask directly which part of their order book is growing and which part shrank last year. The answer tells you more about the job's security than the brochure will.