Anglian Water has named the first work to flow through its new £1.5bn Major Projects Framework — a coastal water improvement programme worth more than £400m, targeting Great Yarmouth, Southend, King's Lynn, Boston and sites across Suffolk. This is the moment the framework award from August turns into live project geography. Here's where the work is landing and who should be positioning now.
In August, Anglian Water appointed two joint ventures — Ferrovial Construction with MWH Treatment, and VolkerFitzpatrick with VolkerStevin — to a new £1.5bn Major Projects Framework, sitting outside its existing alliances to add specialist delivery capacity for AMP8 and beyond. At the time, the framework was a capability appointment: two JVs on the books, no named projects. That changed on 14 September, when Anglian Water confirmed the first scheme to run through it — a coastal water improvement programme worth more than £400m, one of the largest single investment strands announced under the framework so far.
For suppliers, this is the point where a framework win becomes a procurement pipeline with real place names attached. Here's what's actually being built, where, and what it means for your business development list.
The £400m+ coastal investment is built around catchment-wide, place-based schemes in the East of England's key seaside locations — Great Yarmouth in Norfolk and Southend in Essex are named as the lead sites, with further work at King's Lynn, Boston and several locations across Suffolk. A separate tranche of over £250m is earmarked for eight other priority areas, focused on reducing storm spills and bacteriological reductions to protect water quality.
The context matters here. The East of England already has the cleanest bathing waters in the country — 96.3% of the region's designated bathing waters were rated "Good" or "Excellent" by the Environment Agency in November 2025, Anglian's best set of results since the current bathing water regulations came into force in 2015. This programme is explicitly framed as protecting and extending that record, not fixing a failing one — which is a different commercial conversation for suppliers than a remediation-driven scheme would be.
Anglian Water has been explicit that the coastal schemes will "prioritise nature-based solutions, such as sustainable drainage systems (SuDS), to enable excess flows to be fully treated following heavy rainfall, protecting bathing water quality by preventing storm overflow discharges." That's a specific procurement signal, not general environmental language — it points to a preference for SuDS design, wetland and soft-engineering specialists over traditional hard-engineered storm tank solutions where the two are viable alternatives.
The coastal programme is confirmed as one of the first projects to run through the new Major Projects Framework — meaning delivery routes through the two appointed JVs rather than a fresh open competition. That's good news if you already have a relationship with either partnership; it's a clear signal of where to focus business development if you don't.
Both JVs will need Tier 2/3 subcontractors and specialist suppliers to actually deliver catchment-scale, multi-site coastal schemes of this size — SuDS design and installation, wetland creation, marine and coastal civils, bacteriological treatment process engineering, and environmental monitoring are all in scope. Anglian Water's stated intent to use nature-based solutions widens the supplier pool beyond the usual heavy-civils contractor base to include landscape-led and ecological delivery specialists who may not have previously seen themselves as AMP8 suppliers.
The coastal programme is one strand of a much larger acceleration. Anglian Water's Year 1 delivery on its £11bn AMP8 plan already ran at more than double the annual rate achieved during AMP7 — £1.1bn invested, over 1,100 capital projects, 140.5km of new water mains and more than 316,000 smart meters installed. Year 2, already underway, is Anglian's largest annual investment in its history at £1.6bn. Growth pressure from the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor, Sizewell C and the proposed Universal Studios development near Bedford means further named schemes under the Major Projects Framework are likely to follow in the coming months.
Anglian isn't alone in pairing large framework awards with named first projects soon after signing. Watch for the same pattern at other water companies that have recently appointed major projects or capital delivery frameworks — the gap between "framework awarded" and "first scheme named" is often only a matter of weeks, and that's the window when Tier 1 partners are actively assembling their supply chains.
Water Industry Hub tracks not just framework awards, but what happens next — the named schemes, geographies and subcontractor opportunities that follow once a framework goes live. Silver and Gold members get it first.
View Silver Membership Talk to Us First