In December 2002, John Laing was chosen to design, build, finance and operate 16 new police stations and a traffic HQ for the Greater Manchester Police Authority. The £82 million project (of which £74 million was bank funded) provided four divisional headquarters, five sub-divisional headquarters and seven local community police stations, as well as the traffic network headquarters.

John Laing led the project and both hard and soft facilities management are supplied by John Laing Integrated Services. This includes service management, helpdesk, cleaning, waste management, grounds maintenance, estates, utilities management and furniture and equipment services. The now fully operational PPP project has an operational contract of 25 years.

The new buildings cover 38,600 square metres of floor space and the project has enabled almost 3,000 police officers to move from 53 old stations into the 17 new facilities – in some cases enabling patrol, CID, community officers and the Crown Prosecution Service to work out of the same building for the first time since the GMPA was formed in 1974.

Also included in the project was the provision of seven new custody suites, for which the GMPA specified that all were to have natural sunlight. This provided engineers at John Laing with the task of designing special sunpipes to enable sunlight to reach all 194 detention cells.