What happened

Mace Construct is to leave the £200m Daubeny Buildings project at Oxford Science Park at the end of this year, Building and Construction News reported this week. Mace will finish its current package before handing the next stages of the scheme to a new contractor, with Sir Robert McAlpine among the firms linked to taking it on, though the client has yet to confirm a replacement.

Mace has been on the job since summer 2024, working first for original client Oxford Science Parks and then for the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), which bought the site for £890m last autumn from Magdalen College, Oxford, and the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC. Mace had topped out two of the scheme's three six storey laboratory and office buildings before work was halted after EIT's takeover. The contractor only resumed on site last month, after planning approval was secured for a radical Foster + Partners redesign of the partly built scheme, a restart Lechley Pathways covered in September.

Why it matters

Two contractor transitions on one scheme inside little more than a year is unusual even by the standards of a construction market used to client-driven change. It reflects how much power a well funded new owner can exert over an existing build, and how disruptive that is to programme and workforce continuity even on a project that is structurally two-thirds complete. Life sciences and lab fit out work is one of the more resilient parts of the UK construction market right now, but Daubeny shows that resilience doesn't mean stability for the people actually delivering it.

For whichever contractor takes over, this is a handover job rather than a fresh start: inheriting part finished structures, a revised design, and a live relationship with a demanding, well resourced client. That is a different skill set to winning a scheme from scratch, and one that is going to come up again as more stalled or redesigned projects look for a new delivery partner mid build.

What it means for your career

If you're on Mace's Daubeny team, the end of year departure date gives a defined window to start the conversation about redeployment, whether that's onto another Mace scheme or a move to whichever contractor wins the next phase. Contractors taking over part built, redesigned schemes need people who can mobilise fast without the luxury of a clean slate: experienced package managers, M&E leads who can reconcile as-built conditions against a new design, and commercial teams skilled in novation and handover risk.

That handover experience is becoming its own niche. Between Daubeny, the ISG collapse sites still being picked up by other contractors, and the general churn in the sector's financially stressed middle tier, demand for people who have actually managed a mid build contractor transition, rather than just delivered a scheme end to end, is quietly building. If that's on your CV, it's worth foregrounding it.