Construction’s Oscars Are Gone. Here’s How We Win It Back

Construction’s Oscars are gone. I won one. Here’s what we lost, and how we win it back.

There is a particular silence in a ballroom right before they read out a name. A thousand people in black tie, the cutlery stops, and every project manager at every table does the same quiet arithmetic. Is it me?

In 2019, it was me.

The category was Schools. The project was Woodmansterne in Lambeth, a building I had given two years of my life to with the team at Willmott Dixon. When they read my name for the Gold Medal at the Construction Manager of the Year Awards, I honestly do not remember the walk to the stage. I remember the faces around my table. I remember thinking about the people who had taught me how to run a job properly, years before anyone hands you a trophy for it. And I remember understanding, even in that moment, that this was about as good as it gets in our industry.

That was the CMYA. For more than 40 years it was the closest thing British construction had to the Oscars.

It held its final ceremony over a year ago, in May 2025. There will not be another one. And a year on, with the dust settled and no replacement in sight, I find it has stayed with me.

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What the night actually meant

If you have never worked on site, it is hard to explain why a single award mattered so much.

Construction is an industry that celebrates buildings. We photograph the finished thing. We put the architect’s render on the hoarding. We cut the ribbon and we move the cranes to the next plot. The people who actually delivered the building, the ones who held the programme together at 6am in the rain when a partner firm let them down, who made a thousand quiet decisions nobody will ever see, tend to disappear the moment the scaffold comes down.

The CMYA was the one night that flipped that around. It did not award the building. It awarded the person. And it did not do it on the strength of a glossy submission. To win, you sat across from a panel of judges who had read your project inside out, walked your site, and asked you the hard questions in person. You could not buy your way through it with a good writer. You had to have actually done the thing.

I have sat in that interview. It is not comfortable, and it is not meant to be. The judges have spent real time on your project before you walk in, so there is nowhere to hide and nothing to dress up. You end up talking about the decisions you made when things went wrong, because every real project goes wrong somewhere, and what they are quietly measuring is how you led people through it. You leave the room knowing you were assessed by peers who understood exactly what the job demands. Whatever happened next, that respect stayed with you.

That is why a nomination alone was career-defining. Not winning. Being shortlisted. People put it in their email signatures for the rest of their careers, and rightly so.

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The people it put on stage

When I went back through the final decade of winners, what struck me was not the projects. It was the range of human stories the award managed to surface.

Take Marc Burton. In 2021 he won the overall Gold for the Jersey General Hospital Nightingale Wing, a 180-bed hospital his team built in 25 days at the height of the pandemic. Twenty-five days. He was later made an MBE. That is the kind of thing the CMYA existed to find, the moment a project manager stops being a job title and becomes the reason something impossible got done.

Take Steve Fennell, who won in the final 2025 cohort for HMP Fosse Way. Seventy-seven serving prisoners worked on the construction of that project. Around three quarters of them went into employment afterwards. That is a building, yes. It is also a piece of social repair you will never see in a photograph of the finished facade.

And take Amy Griffiths, who won Gold in 2022 for Ysgol Gynradd Gymraeg Tan-y-lan, a Welsh-medium primary school in Swansea. Not a London trophy tower. A community school, delivered for the children who would fill it, in the language those children are growing up speaking. The judges singled out the quality of the build and how happy the client was. The kind of project that changes a neighbourhood and never makes the national press.

Those three never met. They worked for different firms, on different scales, in different corners of the country. The CMYA was the one stage big enough to hold all of them at once. That is what we have lost.

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Now the part we need to be honest about

I loved this award. I still do. Which is exactly why I think we owe it an honest look rather than a tidy eulogy.

I went through every Gold Medal handed out across the last nine ceremonies, 2016 to 2025, 81 medals in total. Then I counted up the firms.

Willmott Dixon won 19 of them. That is nearly one in four. Kier won 13. Between just those two companies, you are looking at 40% of every Gold Medal awarded in a decade. Widen it to the top three firms and you are at 46%. The top five took 57%. More than half of construction’s highest individual honour, across ten years, went to a handful of names.

I want to be the first to put my hand up here, because I am one of those 19. I won my Gold at Willmott Dixon, the firm that tops the entire table. So I am not throwing stones from outside. I am asking the uncomfortable question from the inside.

Were the project managers at those five firms genuinely several times more talented than everyone else delivering buildings in this country?

I do not believe that for a second.

Here is what I think was really happening. The big contractors had dedicated bid teams who knew exactly how to put a submission together. They had the budget to enter, year after year, across every category. And they tended to be handed the marquee, high-value, judge-pleasing projects in the first place. A brilliant project manager at a 30-person regional firm, running a difficult job on a tight margin with no marketing department behind them, often was not even entered. Not because they were not good enough. Because the system was never built to find them.

To be fair to every winner on that list, and I mean this, the big firms genuinely do run the largest and most complex jobs, so some skew is honest and earned. But not 46% to three names. And here is the detail that gives the game away: 15 of the 28 firms that ever won a Gold won exactly once. A single appearance, then gone. That long tail is full of excellent people who got their one moment and were never structurally likely to get another.

There is one honest counter-point buried in the same numbers, and I want to give it air. The very top prize, the overall Construction Manager of the Year, was far less concentrated than the category medals. Across the nine ceremonies, eight different firms took the overall title, and only one company, McAleer & Rushe, won it more than once. So at the absolute pinnacle, the award did spread itself around. It was the layer just below, the category Golds that feed the whole thing, where a small group of names quietly took half of everything. And that is the layer almost every working project manager was actually competing in.

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Why it ended

The official reason is not a scandal. It is quieter and, in a way, sadder.

The CIOB Board of Trustees concluded the awards because entries and sponsorship had been declining for years, to the point where the programme was running at a considerable loss against the charity’s wider work. Despite real effort to keep it going, it had simply become financially unsustainable. The final ceremony took place on 15 May 2025 at the Hilton London Metropole, and that was that.

Read those two things next to each other and a pattern jumps out. An award that clustered around a small group of large firms. An award that, in the end, did not have enough firms entering to pay for itself. Those are not two separate problems. They are the same problem looked at from two angles.

If most of the industry quietly believes an award is not really for them, eventually they stop entering. And once they stop entering, the whole thing stops adding up.

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How we win it back

I do not think the answer is to mourn the CMYA. I think the answer is to rebuild it as something fairer, and in doing so, make it sustainable again.

The single biggest change I would make is to the scoring. Judge a project manager relative to the size, budget and resource they actually had. Delivering a £9.9m school in Swansea with a lean team is not a lesser achievement than delivering a £200m tower with a hundred specialists behind you. In some ways it is a greater one. A scoring system that recognised that, that actively went looking for the brilliant operator in the smaller business rather than waiting for the polished submission from the big one, would change who walks up to that stage.

Practically, that might look like categories banded by project value, so a £5m job is judged against other £5m jobs and not against a cathedral. It might look like regional rounds that take the judging out to the people, instead of asking everyone to buy a table in central London. It might look like a lighter, cheaper format a smaller firm can actually afford to enter without a marketing department behind it. None of that dilutes the prestige. A Gold is still a Gold. It just means the net is cast across the whole industry rather than the part of it that already knew how to play the game.

Make it less of an expensive London gala and more of something the whole industry can reach. Open it up so a site manager in Carlisle or a project lead at a regional contractor in Wales feels it is genuinely theirs to win. Do that, and you do not just make it fairer. You widen the pool of people who enter, and a wider pool is exactly what a self-funding awards programme needs to survive. Fairness and sustainability are not in tension here. They are the same fix.

The talent has not gone anywhere. There are people delivering extraordinary work on sites across this country this morning who will never be photographed, never be quoted, and under the old model would never have been entered. Recognition will find a new shape eventually. I would just rather we build the better version on purpose than wait a decade for something to grow back by accident.

My Gold Medal still sits on a shelf at home. It meant the world to me, and it still does. I would just like to live in an industry where a lot more people get to feel the way I felt in that room in 2019.

So I will leave it as a question, because I genuinely want to know what you think.

If you could redesign construction’s highest honour from scratch, who would you build it to find?