Wills Bros £13.8M Devon relief road: design and ground risks for engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
Devon County Council has awarded Wills Bros Civil Engineering a £13.8M contract to construct the Cullompton Town Centre Relief Road in Devon, aiming to divert through‑traffic away from the constrained B3181 corridor. The scheme is expected to unlock planned housing and commercial development around Cullompton by improving access to junction 28 of the M5 and reducing congestion in the narrow historic high street. Geotechnical and civils teams can anticipate typical greenfield relief‑road challenges, including soft ground risk, drainage integration with the River Culm catchment, and tie‑ins to existing local roads.
Technical Brief
- Contract value fixed at £13.8M, setting a tight capex envelope for earthworks and structures.
Our Take
Devon County Council also features in our coverage of the £5.4bn Southern Construction Framework 6, suggesting the Cullompton Town Centre Relief Road is part of a wider, pipeline-based procurement strategy rather than a one‑off scheme.
Wills Bros Civil Engineering’s use of advanced Trimble survey and machine control systems on the A9 dualling project in Scotland signals that the Cullompton scheme in Devon is likely to benefit from similar digital workflows, which can tighten earthworks tolerances and programme certainty.
Within our 832-item Infrastructure corpus, Devon appears mainly in relation to regional frameworks and highways upgrades, so this standalone town-centre relief road contract marks a relatively targeted intervention in local congestion rather than a mega-scheme tied to national corridors.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
