Willmott Dixon sets the standard for sustainable development, collaborating with partner organisations to tackle the issues that matter to our industry and enabling our people to make a difference in the communities we work in.
2025 in review
Our focus in 2025 was to boost growth across the business following last year’s return to profit.
Our pipeline of net zero carbon in operation and Passivhaus projects is testament to our market-leading in-house specialist teams and strong track record of delivery. At the year end, we had over £1.45bn of projects on site or at pre-construction stage that must meet exacting energy performance requirements.
This expertise is increasingly being applied on some of the UK’s most important public sector projects, from the first Wave 1 scheme to start on site under the Government’s New Hospital Programme at Derriford Hospital (below) to a growing pipeline of education projects with demanding operational energy targets.
Our efforts to reduce our impact on climate change were recognised for the second successive year by the Carbon Disclosure Project as we maintained our position on the CDP A list. We were one of 877 (top 4%) companies to receive the A rating out of more than 22,000 companies worldwide disclosing environmental data, putting us among the global leaders on climate action and carbon transparency.
We also maintained our ‘Champion Level’ status with Carbon Reduction Code for the Built Environment.
Our performance in the FT Climate Leaders list 2025 - the Financial Times’ league table of sustainability – improved on 2024, gaining ground on our competitors. We scored 74.5 - a decent uplift on 2024’s 72.3 - putting us ahead of Berkeley Group, Costain, Mitie and Barratt Developments.
Our Energy Synergy® service took top prize in two categories at the CIBSE Building Performance Awards - winning best Building Performance Evaluation Practice and was selected for the CIBSE Next Generation of Building Performance Award by young CIBSE engineers as their standout entry across all categories.
Stockport Interchange was crowned Project of the Year (over £50m) at the Construction News Awards 2025. The £140m project, delivered in partnership with Transport for Greater Manchester, Stockport Council, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and CityRise, was selected from 523 entries by a panel of 75 industry judges.
We also strengthened our leadership on building safety, achieving Building a Safer Future Champion status and continuing to support customers through the new regulatory regime introduced by the Building Safety Act. Our work on The Stage in Luton demonstrated the technical expertise and persistence needed to help bring complex schemes forward under Gateway 2.
We actively collaborate with our frameworks SCAPE, SCF, P23, Procurement Hub on multiple working groups, including seat on SCF carbon group supporting relaunch of SCF’s carbon toolkit. In 2025, we marked our 20th year of partnership with SCAPE's national construction framework, which since 2006 has enabled the delivery of almost 600 public sector projects across England and Wales, with a combined value of more than £6bn.
We continued to be an employer of choice in 2025, with our companywide people survey reporting 98% levels of employee engagement.
Externally, we were named as one of the top ten big companies in The Sunday Times Best Places to Work 2025. And we came fourth in the Financial Times Best Employers list of the top 1,000 companies in Europe, helping to represent the UK as one of two companies from this country to feature in the top 10.
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Influencing policy
Our people support the growth of sustainable policy and practice in our industry through their involvement with groups and associations that drive knowledge and understanding.
We work with the government, our industry and other collaborators on sector issues, the UK economy and the built environment. In 2025, we continued to push for policy changes which support a more sustainable built environment through our membership of industry and cross-sector groups.
We are a founder of the Supply Chain Sustainability School (SCSS), where we are an advisory board member.
Our Chief Sustainability Officer, Mike Cross, spoke at InsiderMedia's Shaping Sustainable Construction lunch, sponsored by The University of Salford’s Centre for Sustainable Innovation, Think Hire, and Manchester Hall, sharing his views on the challenges and innovations shaping sustainable construction with a range of leaders from the North West’s property sector.
Our Brilliant Buildings team helps to shape future sustainable building standards and regulations. Our head of building performance Alasdair Donn contributed expertise to the Future Homes and Building Standards, launched in Spring 2026. Alasdair was also involved in the peer review process of CIBSE’s Domestic Heating Design Guide.
Since 2022, our people have contributed to task groups for the UK Green Building Council’s Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard, and, in 2025, we ran five pilot projects for the Standard - more than any other contractor.
Principal Sustainability Manager Doug Drewniak was a guest speaker at the CIBSE conference 2025, sharing learnings from our pilot at Glyn-coch Primary School in Wales with an expert audience at the Royal College of Physicians.
Doug also wrote an article in Construction Management Magazine on the implications of the Standard’s focus on performance verification.
We are also actively involved with the UK Passivhaus Trust, as members of their Education Steering Group, which aims to train 50% of the construction industry to deliver Passivhaus or equivalent standards by 2030.
Our Building Lives team represented Willmott Dixon at ministerial level at the Ministry of Justice Prison Leaver Roundtables and as members of Social Value UK and the National Social Value Taskforce.
We continued to push for policy changes in support of a more sustainable built environment through our membership of industry and cross-sector groups, including: Build UK, Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB), Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM) Construction and Demolitions Waste Forum, CL:AIRE, Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) and Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA).
Our people represent the company on the Boards of Constructing Excellence, Pagabo Foundation, Employers Forum for Reducing Reoffending, Social Value UK, the National Social Value Taskforce and the UK Passivhaus Trust.
Our experts were featured speakers and panellists at UKREiiF, HACT, and London Build Expo.
At UKREiiF in Leeds, we hosted a session in the Willmott Dixon pavilion ‘From ambition to action’, focused on delivering net-zero buildings, featuring both Francesca Wilkinson, Senior Sustainability Manager, and Lorna Taverner, Architecture and Design Service, alongside local government leaders (below). Lorna also led another session about Passivhaus for the public sector. Francesca also took part in a panel session hosted by Integrated Environmental Solutions on net zero real estate.
Follow this link to find out more about our representation on these groups.
COP30
COP30 reinforced the direction of travel on fossil fuels, even if governments stopped short of adopting a stronger formal commitment in the final negotiated outcome. Instead, the Brazilian Presidency committed to a roadmap to help turn the COP28 agreement on “transitioning away from fossil fuels” into practical implementation.
Against this backdrop, we continued to translate ambition into action across our own operations. As part of our commitment to eliminate fossil fuels from our operations by 2030, our overall fuel use fell by 46%, with mandated HVO accounting for 70% of fuel used and diesel reduced to just 1%. As a business, this a step towards eliminating fossil fuels from our operations by 2030 with our switch to mandate HVO seeing diesel account for just 1% of our footprint.