How to Get DIO Construction Contracts Through Tier 1s

There are two routes into Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) construction work.

The first is to bid for a main contract when DIO or the MOD publishes a notice. The second is to get onto the package list of a prime or facilities management (FM) contractor that already holds the work. For most civils, M and E, housing and product suppliers, the second route is the realistic one. It comes down to three moves:

1. Start with the contractors you already supply.
2. At each one, find the person who awards your package. That is usually a package manager, commercial manager, supply chain manager or project director.
3. Prove you are safe to work with before you ask for a call.

DIO sets the requirement and pays for the estate. The tier 1 decides whose price goes into its bid and whose crew comes onto site. Plan your outreach around the second group.

Who actually buys DIO construction work?

The official front door is DIO's own procurement page (Procurement at DIO). It points suppliers to three places:

1. Procurement at MOD, which lists the ways to do business with the ministry.
2. Find a Tender, which DIO calls the central digital platform. Suppliers enter their core business information there once and reuse it across bids and customers.
3. Government Commercial Agency frameworks. To join one, you respond to a contract notice and win the tender.

The page also offers an opt-in form for DIO updates and events.

That page shows where main contracts are advertised. It does not tell a drainage subcontractor, an M and E firm or a door supplier who will buy from them. On a live project, that decision sits one level down, inside the contractor that won.

Here is the buyer map to use before a supplier writes a single message:

The idea that a tier 1 on a DIO job ignores strangers does not match my own record. For a UK maker of fall-protection equipment for construction sites, my team and I spent 2 years on cold email and LinkedIn: 600+ leads, 200+ sales calls and 24 countries, with AECOM, bp, Skanska, Doka, Altrad and Saipem among the firms that replied.

So contractors of the size that win DIO work do answer a message from a stranger. Whether you reach the right person inside it depends on the list you build.

For a new construction client, I go through past projects first and find out who really signed off each order. Then I search with the titles that trade really uses, such as package manager or commercial manager, never a bare "manager". A title only belongs on your list if you can say what that person decides about your package.

What is the Defence Housing Strategy £9bn program?

The Defence Housing Strategy is a 10-year plan to renew military family housing. It was announced on 2 November 2025 with £9bn over the next decade to modernize, refurbish or rebuild more than 40,000 military homes. Around 14,000 of those homes get substantial refurbishment or replacement. The MOD also says its surplus land could take more than 100,000 new homes (MOD press release). An independent review team developed it, using a survey of over 6,000 service families.

A July 2026 release puts the backing at £9.2 billion. It describes the plan as upgrading or replacing nine in ten homes over the next decade, with up to 100,000 new homes on surplus Defence land (MOD, July 2026).

The same release shows one way the homes get bought. Through its Capital Purchase Programme, DIO purchased 281 new-build homes near Imjin Barracks: 232 built by Taylor Wimpey, 24 by Bloor Homes and 25 by Bovis Homes. As part of the Army's estate optimization program, the same barracks is getting accommodation blocks for single personnel, garages, workshops, more admin buildings and an upgraded gym.

The strategy also creates a new Defence Housing Service. The MOD calls it the centrepiece of a Forces First approach, alongside a ten-year housebuilding program on surplus defense land (MOD, Defence Housing Service). That release also notes a January deal that returned 36,000 military family homes to public ownership. On selected surplus sites, homeownership terms will be agreed between the MOD, the developer and the local council.

What the strategy means for package volume:

1. Refurbishment of thousands of existing homes feeds envelope, roofing, windows, heating, kitchen and bathroom trades. They work under whichever contractor holds the refurbishment work.
2. Replacement and new build feeds groundworks, civils, utilities and the housebuilder supply chain.
3. Homes on surplus land bring developers in as a named party. For suppliers already selling to housebuilders, that buyer is familiar.

Each of these lands with a contractor or developer first, so that is where you sell.

How do DIO frameworks and tier 1 supply chains work?

Some DIO work is framework-led. A contractor wins a framework place by responding to a contract notice and winning the tender, as DIO's procurement page explains. Other work flows through contracts DIO already holds with prime and FM contractors.

Hard facilities management is the clearest example of the second type. Inside DIO describes Future Defence Infrastructure Services (FDIS) as a new hard FM model for the Built Estate, launched as older contracts finish (Inside DIO, FDIS).

Keep two kinds of package apart:

1. Hard FM packages cover planned and reactive maintenance of building fabric and systems. They suit M and E firms, roofers, door and window suppliers and anyone who services what is already built. The buyer is the FM contractor's supply chain or operations side.
2. Construction packages cover new builds, replacements and major refurbishments. They suit civils, groundworks, frame, envelope and fit-out. The buyer is the tier 1's package or commercial manager.

The same firm can hold both kinds of contract. The people who buy them are often different, so treat them as separate accounts on your list.

There is one more difference that matters more than any portal. Finding an opportunity is not the same as being invited to price it. A notice on Find a Tender tells you a main contract exists. It does not put you on anyone's package list. If you first hear about a package when it shows up publicly, assume the contractor has already started choosing who it prices with.

How do you get in front of the right DIO buyer?

Start from the contractors who already pay you. On every new account, I review the client's past and current customers before anything else, then build the list from firms like them. I explain the full logic of choosing a market from your closed deals in the Journal.

For defense estate work, that becomes a ring order:

1. Contractors you already supply that hold defense estate work.
2. Contractors you already supply on other public work, such as schools, hospitals or highways.
3. Contractors on the same programs as ring 1. Look at who builds the housing, who holds FM and who delivers training estate projects.
4. Specialist firms already named on live projects, as potential partners rather than competitors.

The decision rule: do not open ring 3 until rings 1 and 2 have a named owner and a first message sent.

Then split the work. I divide territories by account and rep so two people on my team never touch the same lead. For DIO work, split by program lane first and account second:

One contractor belongs to one rep across every site and every program. If a contractor works in two lanes, it goes to the lane where it has the most live work. The other rep passes any lead they find to the owner and never messages that contractor directly. Without this rule, one package manager gets two pitches from your company in the same week.

An account plan beats random cold outreach here because the money moves on a calendar of years. The housing renewal runs over a decade (covered above) and the Defence Investment Plan over four financial years (covered below). A known door at a contractor you already supply keeps paying off for longer than a cold name pulled from a project announcement.

What buyer checks happen before they take a call?

A commercial manager on defense work will look you up before answering. Your first job is to make that check easy.

Have these ready before the first message goes out:

1. Your trade accreditations, with certificate numbers to hand.
2. Your Cyber Essentials status, or a straight answer on it, if your work touches a contractor's systems or data.
3. Security vetting: which of your people can get site access, and how long clearance has taken before.
4. Your site safety record: incident figures, method statements and your last safety audit.
5. Two or three comparable jobs, with the contractor and scope named, ideally on public or secure sites.
6. Your capacity: crews, lead times and the regions you can cover next quarter.
7. A profile and website where a buyer can confirm all of the above in two minutes.
8. A clean list and a clean sending setup. On my campaigns, every address is verified before a send and bounces stay under 0.5%. I also put SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place before any real volume goes out. If you are new to this, audit your lead list before anything is sent.

Items 1 to 4 decide whether a contractor can use you at all. Items 5 to 7 decide whether they want to. If any of the first four is missing, fix it before outreach. Booking a call that ends in "come back when you are vetted" wastes a door you only get to knock on a few times.

Which live programs should contractors watch now?

Three signals show where defense estate money is moving.

The Defence Investment Plan adds £15 billion between 2026-27 and 2029-30, and the government says it gives long-term certainty over procurement priorities (DIP funding explainer). In his statement of 30 June 2026, the Defence Secretary committed £9 billion over a decade to military family housing and £26 billion to naval base upgrades, including at Faslane, Portsmouth and Devonport. He also called on "Primes and SMEs" and promised a culture shift in procurement (oral statement). Read both as the funding backdrop. The named lines in the DIP explainer cover drones, munitions and a Defence Export facility, not the estate, and neither document lists packages.

The training estate is where the supply chain becomes visible. More than £4.4 million went into new trench training infrastructure, with Landmarc Support Services and the British Army delivering it through DIO (MOD, training estate). The work added trench layouts at Copehill Down Training Village and trench networks at Eastmere Village in the Stanford Training Area. On the Stanford project, specialist suppliers included Knights Brown Construction, Land Sculpture Civils and 5C Consulting.

Look at that line-up as a supplier. DIO owns the requirement and Landmarc delivers. The named firms are the layer where civils packages actually landed.

Plan each row as a multi-quarter account play.

What should a contractor outreach plan look like?

Here is a worked example. A regional civils firm does drainage and hardstanding. It has worked under two contractors on public sites and wants training estate and barracks packages.

Who to target, in order:

1. Package managers at the two contractors it already works for.
2. Commercial managers at the same two firms.
3. Package managers at contractors delivering training estate or barracks work in its region.
4. Estimators at those firms, with rates and capacity.

A first message should only try to earn a short conversation. A made-up example to a package manager:

Subject: Drainage capacity for your next estate package

Hi Sam, your team runs groundworks on defense sites in the region. We have recently delivered drainage and hardstanding on comparable public sites under contractors you will know. Our crews and site staff are cleared for secure sites, and we have capacity from next quarter. Would 15 minutes before your next package goes out be useful?

That is about 60 words. It names one scope, one proof point, the readiness answer a defense buyer cares about, and one small ask.

For the sequence, this example opens on LinkedIn so the first email lands as a follow-up, not a cold intro. It runs 6 touch points across both channels (the mechanics are in running LinkedIn and email as one sequence):

1. LinkedIn connection request with a one-line note.
2. LinkedIn message after they accept, with the short pitch above.
3. Warm email that continues the LinkedIn conversation.
4. Follow-up email with one comparable job and its scope.
5. Short LinkedIn follow-up.
6. A final email that offers to send rates and capacity instead of a call.

This is a structure, not a reply-rate forecast.

How should you decide if DIO work is worth pursuing?

Run the decision before you write more messages:

1. If you already supply a contractor that holds defense estate work, pursue it. Start there and work outward through the ring order.
2. If you supply contractors on other public work but none on defense, pursue it slowly. Use rings 2 and 3, and get the readiness checks done first.
3. If you have no contractor relationships and no comparable jobs, do not force this channel yet. Win public or secure site work elsewhere, then come back with proof.
4. If your cash flow cannot wait through a long buying cycle, keep defense as a side lane and fund the business from faster markets.
5. If the packages you can deliver are small and the readiness work is heavy, run the arithmetic on value per package against the months it takes before committing.

Count the market too. If your trade has only a handful of contractors active on defense work in your region, depth matters more than volume. Reach several people per contractor, run longer sequences and expect to be patient.

Not sure which tier 1 contractors on DIO packages deserve a message from you? We could go through your list on a call, whenever suits you.