When a main contractor goes under, subcontractors are usually the ones left out of pocket. When Carillion collapsed in January 2018, it owed around £2 billion to some 30,000 suppliers, subcontractors and other short-term creditors, according to the MPs who investigated it.
Until now there was no single place to look back at who has failed, when, and what the records showed beforehand. So we built one.
Search the UK construction failures register
What's in it
The register lists 229 larger UK construction businesses that entered administration or liquidation or agreed a CVA with their creditors. It is built from Companies House and Gazette records and covers:
- 114 main contractors
- 42 housebuilders
- 34 developers
- 19 civil engineering firms
- a small number of other construction businesses
For each one you can see what happened and when, the timeline of insolvency events, the last accounts filed and how long before the failure they were made up to, press coverage where we have matched it, and links to the official records.
The register focuses on the firms that catch out the most subcontractors: companies big enough to file full, group or medium-sized accounts before they failed, plus well-known failures we have checked by hand.
Some of the names
It includes the failures most people in the industry will remember:
- Carillion, compulsory liquidation, January 2018
- Interserve, administration, March 2019
- Tolent Construction, administration, February 2023
- Buckingham Group Contracting, administration, September 2023
- Michael J. Lonsdale, administration, October 2023
- ISG Construction, administration, September 2024
And it is kept current. 21 of the firms in the register failed in 2026 so far, including FK Group and Jerram Falkus Construction in February, Ardmore Construction Group in June and Helix Construct in September.
One pattern worth knowing
Private companies have nine months after their year end to file accounts at Companies House. So if a company's most recent accounts are for a year that ended more than 21 months ago, its next set is usually overdue.
In 69 of the 229 failures in the register, about 3 in 10, the last accounts on file were made up more than 21 months before the company failed. Late accounts don't mean a company is in trouble. But they are free to check, and they showed up in a lot of these failures.
You can check this for any contractor on its Companies House page, or on its Construction Rating company page, where our financial signals flag overdue accounts automatically.
How to use it
- Search by name. Failed companies often change their name before or after they fail, so the search covers current, registered and previous names, and group names.
- Filter by year, type of insolvency, sector and region.
- Open an entry to see the timeline, last accounts and press coverage, with links to Companies House and The Gazette.
What's next
- The register is refreshed from Companies House on the first of every month.
- We're writing plain-English lessons learned reports on the biggest failures. The first is out: Carillion: how a construction giant collapsed, and 12 checks to protect your business. Each report covers what happened, the warning signs and when they became visible, and the checks to make before you work for a main contractor. The headline figures are free to read; create a free account to read the full reports.
The register covers companies still in administration or liquidation plus verified well-known failures, so older failures that have since been dissolved are under-represented. It doesn't include individuals or sole traders. If you spot an error or a failure we've missed, tell us.