Laing O’Rourke has appointed Clare Rodgers as head of Expanded Geotechnical, making her the first female business unit leader across any of the contractor’s specialist trading businesses. Rodgers moves from Select, where she was lifting solutions leader responsible for complex crane and heavy lifting strategies, bringing temporary works and lifting logistics expertise directly into the ground engineering unit. She succeeds Ronan O’Rourke, who becomes director of clients and markets for Laing O’Rourke’s Europe Hub, signalling closer alignment between geotechnical delivery and major project clients.

Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering, VSL Systems (UK) and Bachy Soletanche will jointly deliver major geotechnical works for the Sizewell C nuclear project, covering piling, soil mixing, diaphragm walls and plastic cut-off walls. The package will form key below-ground containment and support structures for the twin EPR units, where groundwater control and long-term settlement performance are critical on the Suffolk coast. The collaboration signals early locking-in of specialist contractors for complex deep-foundation and seepage-control systems on one of the UK’s largest current infrastructure schemes.

An updated “higher confidence model” from the British Geological Survey refines estimates of superficial deposit thickness above Great Britain’s bedrock, giving engineers improved depth-to-rock data for foundations, earthworks and buried infrastructure. The model integrates existing BGS geological mapping with borehole records and geophysical datasets to reduce uncertainty in areas with complex drift sequences and variable till or alluvium cover. Practitioners can use the outputs to optimise preliminary ground investigation targeting, refine early-stage design assumptions and better screen geohazard susceptibility at corridor and site scale.