Beneath every street,
the work that keeps
Britain running.

Two weeks in: what's working, what isn't.

Nine days after the mobilisation stand-down, the management team sat down together at the Sheffield office to take stock of the first weeks as Principal Contractor.

The point of the meeting was to get the real picture out on the table — issues that had come up, what had gone well, and what hadn't. Managers who'd hit the same problem in different depots comparing notes, and the ones who'd found a better way of doing something passing it on.

Taking on the role is one thing. Running it properly means catching the friction early, while it's still a conversation rather than a habit — and being willing to say plainly what isn't working, which is harder than reporting what is.

It won't be the last of them. Sitting down regularly to compare what's actually happening on site is how the standard holds once the launch day is over.

Two more mini excavators on the fleet.

Our commitment to invest in better plant continues. Two new SANY SY18C mini excavators joined the fleet in June, each supplied with a Prodem breaker on the quick hitch.

Buying rather than hiring is a deliberate choice. A hired machine that goes wrong on a Friday afternoon is somebody else's problem to fix and yours to wait for. Our own machine gets swapped from our own yard, and the programme keeps moving. On a live gas job with a road closure booked and customers off supply, that difference is measured in days.

Owning it also means it gets looked after. Every mini on the fleet carries a daily check sheet, and anything found goes on the defect register with a name and a date against it. Newer plant fails less, but the reason ours keeps running is that faults get caught while they're still small.

There's a quieter benefit too. Modern machines are cleaner and less noisy than the ones they replace — which matters a great deal when you're working outside somebody's front window for a fortnight.

Both machines are equipped with modern telematics — SANY's eVISION system — so hours, fuel, fault codes and service intervals report back automatically rather than waiting for someone to notice.

Leicester depot opened.

Our third depot is now operational on Aylestone Road, Leicester, joining Sheffield and Nottingham.

It puts crews, plant and stores closer to the southern end of the East Midlands programme. Less time on the motorway at either end of a shift means more of the day on the job, and a machine that goes wrong in the morning can be swapped out the same day rather than the next one.

The yard carries extra space for plant and materials, which matters as the programme grows and more of the work is run directly by us.

Achilles UVDB audit: 100% across every module.

SAUK holds Achilles UVDB Verify Category B1 — the utilities industry's supplier audit — and scored 100 in all seven modules: health & safety, environmental, quality and sustainability at management level, and health & safety, environmental and quality again out on site.

That last part is what gives it weight. Half of a B1 audit is an auditor visiting a live site and checking whether what's written in the office is actually happening in the street. Scoring full marks in the office is one thing; scoring full marks on site is where most contractors lose points.

The registration also covers gas mains and services, water mains and services, and pipeline CCTV and inspection — so the audited scope already reaches past the gas programme into the work we're growing into.

GD2: closed out at the top of the scorecard.

SAUK closed out the GD2 regulatory period at the very top of the Client KPI Scorecards — the metrics covering Safety, Compliance, Customer and Delivery — across the East Midlands network we serve.

And it wasn't a momentary peak. We held that position consistently for the entire duration of GD2 — five full years, every quarterly review — without once trading safety for output to get there. That is the part we're proudest of, because holding a standard for five years is a different thing from hitting it once.

A huge credit to our site teams, support staff and management. Their standards, discipline and commitment made it happen.

Now the focus shifts to GD3, where the challenge is simple: raise the bar again.

SSIP assessed at Principal Contractor level.

SAUK has been assessed and certified under SSIP — Safety Schemes in Procurement — in the category of Principal Contractor with five or more employees, valid to March 2027.

SSIP is the scheme clients use so that a contractor's health and safety arrangements don't have to be assessed from scratch by every organisation that engages them. The assessment looks at how we plan, manage and monitor safety — the policy, the risk assessments, the training records, the way incidents are reported and acted on.

Being certified at Principal Contractor level means that assessment covered running a site we're accountable for, rather than working under someone else's control. It's the level the role demands, and it's held independently of any one client.

Fifth vacuum excavator joins the fleet.

Our fifth vacuum excavator arrived on 3 July 2025 — a serious commitment to a method that costs more per hour and is worth every penny of it.

A Vac-Ex unit breaks the ground with air or water and lifts the spoil away by suction. Nothing hard ever touches what's buried. Around a live gas main, an armoured cable or a water main under a footway, that is the difference between exposing a service and striking one — and a strike is measured in danger to the crew and the public first, and cost second.

Five units means it isn't a machine we book when there's time. It's available at every depot, so the safe method is the one the crews can actually have on the day they need it. A safe way of working that you have to queue for gets quietly abandoned.

When the fleet isn't on our own programme it goes out on hire, operator and machine together, to other contractors working near live services.

ISO 9001 certified.

SAUK's management system was approved to ISO 9001:2015 by LRQA on 9 June 2025, certified through to June 2028.

The scope is the part worth reading. It covers "the provision of gas pipeline replacement, including excavation, installation, testing, commissioning and reinstatement activities for gas network" — the whole job, start to finish, rather than a narrow slice of it.

What ISO 9001 actually demands is that the way we work is written down, followed, checked, and corrected when it isn't followed. That's why the daily check sheets, the audits and the defect registers exist — and why an auditor can turn up and ask to see them.

Grab hire added to the offer.

Grab lorries are now available to external clients on day rate or project hire — the same service we've run alongside our own gas programme for years.

Muck-away from utility excavations, aggregate delivery and site clearance, operator-led, O-licensed and waste-carrier registered. The paperwork is in order because it has to be for our own work.

It's the same pattern as Vac-Ex: plant we bought for ourselves, run by operators who use it every day, made available to others when there's capacity.

Andy's Man Club & Owlerton Dogs.

The whole team got together for a charity evening at Owlerton Dogs in Sheffield. They raised £500 on the night, which SAUK matched pound for pound — £1,000 in a single week.

Collection tins have been round the Nottingham depot since, and the posters and leaflets have gone out onto site.

Andy's Man Club run free peer-to-peer groups for men, every Monday at 7pm across the UK. No referral, no appointment — you turn up. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45 in this country, and construction sites are full of exactly the people those groups exist for. That's why we talk about it rather than just donating quietly.

We're back at Owlerton on Saturday 26 September 2026, this time in support of Lighthouse — the construction industry's own charity.