Civil engineering and infrastructure specialist Barhale has opened a new office in South Yorkshire as part of a two-part strategy to increase “on the doorstep” support for clients and to promote local workforce recruitment.

The new location in Mexborough strengthens Barhale’s representation in the county and completes its planned network of offices through the Network Rail Eastern Region as the business continues to grow its rail infrastructure business. Barhale’s office locations now include London, Walsall, St Albans, Peterborough, Great Billing, Wisbech, Leeds and Edinburgh.

The opening also reflects Barhale’s commitment to its social value and diversity strategy which focuses on sourcing, training and retaining people from local communities to work on its civil engineering and infrastructure contracts.

Barhale Chief Executive Martin Brown sees establishing local points of presence as important to both the business’s operational approach and to its philosophy of supporting local communities.

“We take great pride in our direct delivery model,” he said. “We believe it provides clients with a better, more agile workforce motivated by common purpose and values. To support the model, there is obviously an advantage from recruiting locally in terms of speed of deployment and being able to tap into local knowledge. There’s also a real benefit from the sense of ownership the team has when it’s working in and improving its own community which drives better results.

“From a social perspective, we are also strongly committed to putting something back into the communities where we’re active – through recruitment and helping people develop their careers and through our local corporate responsibility programme.”

The new office is housed in the former Mexborough Grammar School building.

Adrian Morley, now Development Director of Impact Resourcing which provides specialist support services to Barhale in recruiting people from disadvantaged communities, said:

“It’s great to see Barhale continue to invest in to the local communities and people – the business’s actions really are reflective of their company values.”

With more than 40 years’ experience in the construction industry, the civil engineering and infrastructure specialist was originally set up as a specialist tunnelling contractor. While retaining its tunnelling roots, repeated success across the water, energy, transport and built environment markets of the construction industry has enabled Barhale to expand its skill sets to become one of the largest privately-owned infrastructure specialists in the UK.