Stevens, a chartered civil engineer, joins Kier in the New Year as managing director of the regional business, which encompasses Birmingham, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire, and Warwickshire.

He will also head Kier’s Performance Excellence agenda, to improve operational delivery to clients and partners.

Stevens worked for Bouygues for over 13 years, most recently as board director and managing director at Bouygues UK Residential.

Before that he was managing director of the London and South East for four years, having held several director roles since joining from Warings where had been operations director at the time of being bought by the French contractor.

Liam Cummins, group managing director, Kier Construction said: “We continue to attract great talent and Chris’ appointment follows on from our recently announced appointment of Helen Samuels who will join us as our technical director in January.

“I am looking forward to working with Chris, who will play an important role as part of our senior leadership team.

“This new role will accelerate the implementation of our Construction strategy with a specific focus on growing our business in the Midlands as well as implementing our Performance Excellence agenda, which underpins our successful operational delivery to clients and partners.

Chris will be working with our operational leadership across the business to embed our Performance Excellence framework to bring new levels of certainty to our project delivery.”