Attending Laing O’Rourke’s Digital Expo in Manchester allowed CM to pick the brains of Paul Drayton, the contractor’s head of digital – Europe. He talks to Justin Stanton about MMC, digital non-negotiables and digital’s role.
What have Coldplay, Shaun The Sheep, David Hockney and Laing O’Rourke got in common? They have all headlined exhibition and performance spaces at Aviva Studios in Manchester. The first three on that list make sense, but what about Laing O’Rourke?
Having built and handed over the Aviva Studios venue to client Factory International in 2023, the contractor returned to the site as the main attraction for one day in September 2025, staging its Digital Expo. The event, for 400 people (the contractor’s staff, clients and its digital supply chain – plus this journalist), was a mini-exhibition/conference. It was conceived by Paul Drayton, head of digital – Europe at Laing O’Rourke, and delivered by members of his team.
“Architects like to design. Engineers like to design. We often treat projects as one-offs, but now we have an opportunity to standardise the invisible and customise the visible.”
There are more than 200 people in Laing O’Rourke’s digital team, including digital engineers, information managers, those involved in broader digital adoption and developments, plus those working for the contractor’s specialist arms such as Select Plant Hire and Expanded. “We take digital seriously – you can’t do it off the side of your desk,” Drayton tells CM.
“We’ve got 30 live projects, all in different phases, and it’s impossible for everyone to know everything that everyone’s doing. How do we make the very best of what’s possible accessible to every project? Part of it is having a forum of project leaders sharing and learning from each other. If we can do it on one project in Laing O’Rourke, we can do it on every project in Laing O’Rourke.” Hence the idea of the expo: show staff outside of the digital team what technologies and processes they could be using and what the benefits are.
On stage, there were case studies of technology in action on specific Laing O’Rourke projects and panel discussions with suppliers and clients. Guest speakers were drawn from the likes of Heathrow, the University of Oxford, EDF, Everton, the University of Exeter, National Grid, Rolls Royce SMR and the New University Hospital Monklands. Among the 20-plus exhibitors were the likes of Aecom, Autodesk, BDP, Bentley Systems, Glider, Leica Geosystems and WSP.
Industrialised construction
Between panel sessions, CM tours the expo with Drayton as guide. He’s a passionate advocate for digital and it seems like he’s been practising digital construction all his career, even though he only joined the construction industry three years ago when he took his current post at Laing O’Rourke. But Drayton has experience in construction of another sort: overseeing the build of warships and nuclear submarines for a decade and a half. Given Laing O’Rourke’s ambitions for MMC and industrialised construction methods, Drayton’s appointment was eminently sensible.
“A minimum of 70% of each of our projects must be delivered offsite,” he explains. “It’s one of the non-negotiables. Our operating model is absolutely here to stay, and it’s a fundamental part of our relationship with our chosen design partners. We’re taking the design and we’re working with the design partners to mature it. We’re feeding it into the factory, where we have CAD to CAM [computer-aided manufacture – ed.].”
Delivering on Rolls Royce SMR’s plans requires an end-to-end, digitally enabled solution – and that’s exactly what Laing O’Rourke is driving through its ‘Industrialised Construction Platform’. “We’re excited about the opportunity to co-develop this platform with Rolls Royce SMR, building on the unique capability we’ve already developed and deployed in off-site manufacturing and digital design,” Drayton says.
He emphasises that, while the SMR programme focuses on repeatability, off-site delivery doesn’t mean the end of uniqueness or bespoke design: “Architects like to design. Engineers like to design. We often treat projects as one-offs, but now we have an opportunity to standardise the invisible and customise the visible. The New Hospital Programme is the obvious driver for this approach.”
Next halo digital project?
While Hinkley Point C is on-going, it’s fair to say that the new Everton Stadium was a halo digital project for Laing O’Rourke – an exemplar of the technologies and processes that can be implemented and what can be achieved.
CM asks Drayton what he thinks the contractor’s next halo digital project will be. He muses on the answer, adopting a wider lens: “The biggest pull I see is in healthcare with the New Hospital Programme and the digital hospital. I think there will be a massive step forward in digital, not just in the way that we deliver projects, but in the way that we operate hospitals.
“What you and I think of as a digital twin, and what a construction and a FM company or department think of as a digital twin, is about 10% of what the New Hospital Programme or the NHS think of as a digital hospital.
“If, as a sector, we manage to achieve the aspirations of the New Hospital Programme, I think that’s going to be the pathfinder, because it’s truly linking design with manufacture with operations. That’s end-to-end thinking – and that’s where I want to get to.”
Digital non-negotiables
As we continue to tour the expo, Drayton returns to the subject of non-negotiables: “We have digital standards within the business, and a host of those are non-negotiables. They need to show up on every project that we deliver, because we know that they will provide us with certainty, they will provide us with safety, and it’s the right way to do it.”
For example, now mandated on all Laing O’Rourke projects are immersive mission control rooms, which take the BIM cave to the next level. Present at the expo were such rooms from Immersive Interactive and Juice Immersive. Laing O’Rourke is using the interactive-wall-to-interactive-wall technology not only for site inductions, but 4D rehearsals and look-ahead meetings.
At New University Hospital Monklands, Drayton reveals that the immersive space was used for design reviews with the hospital staff. “Rather than clinicians looking at a piece of paper and really not having a clue what they’re looking at, we put them in the immersive room with plans at one-to-one scale. We rolled beds and chairs in so the clinicians could check everything was in the right place for them. As a result, we made fundamental changes in the model before anything had gone to print, before anything had been signed off.”
“Our purpose is to serve projects. We’re not here to do digital for the sake of digital. We’re here to make the boat go faster.”
The role of digital
Of course, there’s always room to test new technology and processes even if introducing them is “like changing the wheel on a moving car”. Drayton says: “Sometimes we hold fire on new technology and introduce it at the start of the next project. There are things where we can push the boundary. We try to do that in a controlled way, so we’re not just having five different people trying five different bits of tech. We’re doing it in a controlled way. If it’s going to succeed, we’re going to succeed fast; if it’s going to fail, and we’re going to need to learn, we do that equally quickly.”
For Laing O’Rourke, digital is a means to end – and perhaps more than one end. “Our purpose is to serve projects. We’re not here to do digital for the sake of digital. We’re here to make the boat go faster,” Drayton declares. “And all of these [digital] tools are a key part of making the boat go faster, doing it safer and,” he pauses for effect, “making it enjoyable and fun as well.”
As CM’s tour finishes, Drayton concludes: “I’ve got 200-plus digital staff – I don’t necessarily need any more: I need the thousands of our colleagues to be comfortable and confident using the tools.”
