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Kier shrugged off the pain of an £18m Office of Fair Trading fine in September with £665m worth of new work.

It is unlikely that the wins have eased the pain completely, however: chief executive John Dodds is understood to be fuming at the level of Kier’s fine, particularly as others (who sang like canaries) got away with far less. Of course Kier could pay the fine tomorrow but that, as Dodds would point out, is hardly the point. Will it appeal? Watch this space.

Its big win was a £600m 10-year deal to repair and maintain 16,000 council homes for North Tyneside council, no doubt pleasingly close to home for the Durham-born Dodds.

In second place was BAM Construct. The Dutch-owned outfit picked up 13 contracts that included the £95m Co-op headquarters in Manchester and a £30m deal for North West Kent college in Dartford.

Balfour Beatty, which picked off Parsons Brinckerhoff last month, also picked up 50 contracts worth £220.4m, including a £57m deal for Exeter university and a £29m education win for Liverpool council.

The huge Kier win skews the figures slightly but the top 30 contractors won a total of £2bn in September, which compares with £1.4bn in the same month last year. Unsurprisingly, only £265m of last month’s haul came from the commercial sector.

Miller finished in fourth spot after several months out of the top five with five wins that included a £34m deal for a college in Barnsley and a £26.3m win for Stoke-on-Trent sixth form college.

The top five was completed by Laing O’Rourke with seven deals worth £107.5m including a £25m deal for Northumberland Tyne & Wear NHS.

The country’s largest private contractor spent another month in third spot in the annual rolling leader board of work won. It cannot please boss Ray O’Rourke, whose growth ambitions are a secret to nobody. And after the Parsons deal, Balfour Beatty will truly take some beating.