Midland Quarry Products

Overview

Midland Quarry Products (MQP) is a Leicestershire-based quarrying and asphalt business that supplies the stone beneath Britain’s railways and the asphalt on its roads. It runs three quarries and ten asphalt plants across the Midlands, operates as part of Heidelberg Materials UK, and is one of four companies holding Network Rail ballast contracts worth a potential £90 million over five years (Heidelberg Materials UK; Rail UK).

MQP entered public record in the worst possible way in 2008, when ballast it supplied under contract to Network Rail was being delivered to a worksite near Barrow upon Soar and the delivery lorry demolished a footbridge, derailing a passenger train (Barrow upon Soar rail crash; RAIB).

That crash defines MQP’s only widely documented brush with national attention, but the company’s ordinary business is more revealing: it sits at the unglamorous end of infrastructure, where crushed granite, asphalt and rail ballast are produced under tight specifications and planning controls. Its flagship Cliffe Hill complex near Stanton under Bardon has been quarried under permissions dating to 1983, and its recent history is a story of consolidation — from a Tarmac–Hanson joint venture to full Hanson ownership in 2013 — and of decarbonisation, with government funding for a net-zero route map at Cliffe Hill (Agg-Net; Heidelberg Materials UK).

From joint venture to full Hanson ownership

MQP began life as a shared business between two of Britain’s biggest building-materials groups, Hanson and Tarmac, each holding half the company. The arrangement ended in 2013, when Hanson — then part of the HeidelbergCement Group — exercised a contractual pre-emption right to buy out Tarmac’s stake, with completion scheduled for 2 April 2013 (Agg-Net). The trigger was competition policy: Tarmac, by then part of Lafarge Tarmac, had agreed to sell its MQP stake to Hope Valley Holdings, a subsidiary of Mittal Investments, as a condition the Competition Commission required for clearing the Lafarge joint venture — but MQP’s own articles of association gave Hanson the right to match that deal and pre-empt the sale (Agg-Net).

Hanson’s chief executive at the time said the company would develop and grow the business while maintaining its product quality and customer service, and that MQP would keep its identity and continue to run independently under managing director Simon Willis (Agg-Net). The episode shows how a regional quarrying firm can become a bargaining chip in national merger clearance: MQP mattered to the Competition Commission not because of its size, but because aggregates markets are local, and losing an independent supplier in the Midlands would have concentrated supply.

Leadership has since turned over twice in public view. Rick Green led the business before retiring after a 40-year career in the industry, and Andrew Boileau succeeded him as managing director in June 2024, arriving from STARK Building Materials after senior roles at Saint-Gobain, including running Gibbs and Dandy (Heidelberg Materials UK). Green had also chaired the Asphalt Industry Alliance since 2017, a trade body partnership between the Mineral Products Association and Eurobitume UK that promotes asphalt to specifiers and policymakers (Heidelberg Materials UK).

What MQP actually does: quarries, asphalt, rail ballast

MQP’s business has three legs: aggregates from its quarries, asphalt from its plants, and rail ballast — the crushed stone bed that carries railway track. The asphalt side is the largest by footprint: ten plants across the Midlands produce coated materials to British Standard and Highways Agency specifications for road building and maintenance (Heidelberg Materials UK). The rail side is the most specialised. Ballast must be hard, durable, angular stone that drains freely while spreading train loads to the sub-base, and MQP’s accreditation in September 2025 under RISQS — the Railway Industry Supplier Qualification Scheme — formally recognised its capability to supply high-quality aggregates, including rail ballast, to the UK rail industry (Agg-Net). Managing director Andy Boileau described the accreditation as independent recognition of the quality of MQP’s rail ballast and of its commitment to operational standards, consistency and safety (Agg-Net).

The scale of the rail-ballast trade puts MQP’s role in context. Network Rail held contracts with four suppliers — Aggregate Industries, MQP, Cemex and Lafarge Aggregates — with a potential value of £90 million over five years to supply around 800,000 tonnes of ballast a year, while typically renewing about 400 track kilometres of ballast annually at a total cost of £16 million, or £40 per metre (Rail UK). Ballast is also the railway’s biggest recycling opportunity: reusing excavated ballast cuts both cost and landfill, and Network Rail’s own recycling centre at Whitemoor was built to process material that would otherwise be waste (Rail UK). For MQP, that makes ballast a business shaped by two pressures at once — the demand for virgin stone that meets exacting specifications, and a customer actively trying to use less of it.

Product line	What it is	Who buys it
Aggregates	Crushed hard rock in single sizes and blends	Building, construction and road industries
Asphalt	Coated materials to British Standard and Highways Agency specifications	Highway construction and maintenance
Rail ballast	Hard, angular crushed stone for track beds	Network Rail, under RISQS-accredited supply

Sources: Heidelberg Materials UK; Agg-Net; Leicestershire County Council.

The Cliffe Hill complex and the Barrow upon Soar connection

MQP’s best-documented site is the Cliffe Hill Quarry complex near Stanton under Bardon, in the Hinckley and Bosworth borough of Leicestershire, close to the M1’s Junction 22 roundabout. Its modern history starts with a 1983 permission covering an extension at Old Cliffe Hill, a ready-mixed concrete plant, the realignment of Cliffe Hill Road and a new quarry at Stud Farm, known as New Cliffe Hill (Leicestershire County Council). The plan sequenced the two pits: Old Cliffe Hill paused while New Cliffe Hill was worked, and in 2003 a tunnel was completed connecting the two quarries beneath the ground north of Stanton under Bardon, allowing work to resume at Old Cliffe Hill with a new primary crusher (Leicestershire County Council).

Full production blasting restarted in early 2006, with stone crushed at Old Cliffe Hill and carried by conveyor through the tunnel to the secondary plant at New Cliffe Hill (Leicestershire County Council). The planning record also shows the friction of quarrying next to a village: a 2006 application to export overburden and toprock through the Old Cliffe Hill access drew conditions on lorry routing, hours and highway safety work at the Junction 22 roundabout (Leicestershire County Council).

The company’s most consequential delivery was not at Cliffe Hill but at Barrow upon Soar, where ballast supplied by MQP under contract to Network Rail was being delivered for track maintenance. The tipper lorry making the delivery was owned and operated by a franchised haulier to the supplier, and its raised body struck the Barrow Old Station footbridge, knocking it onto the line; the Nottingham to Norwich train then struck the debris and derailed. The government’s investigation blamed the lorry driver’s distraction and Network Rail’s lack of a formal process for managing road-vehicle risk near live lines — not the ballast supplier — and recommended that Network Rail assess risks during road-vehicle transit operations on its land near the running line (RAIB). MQP’s later history points in a different direction: in 2022, BEIS funding of £1.46 million supported an Atkins scoping study to develop a net-zero route map for the Cliffe Hill quarry and asphalt plant, described as a first for a UK aggregates and asphalt operation, with lessons intended to scale across Hanson’s roughly 80 aggregate and asphalt sites (Heidelberg Materials UK).

Frequently asked questions

What does Midland Quarry Products do? MQP quarries hard rock for aggregates, manufactures asphalt at ten plants across the Midlands, and supplies rail ballast to Network Rail under RISQS accreditation. It is the Leicestershire-based asphalt and quarrying business of Heidelberg Materials UK, with its best-documented site the Cliffe Hill complex near Stanton under Bardon (Heidelberg Materials UK; Agg-Net).

Who owns Midland Quarry Products? Heidelberg Materials UK owns MQP through Hanson. Hanson originally held half the company in a joint venture with Tarmac, then exercised a pre-emption right in 2013 to acquire Tarmac’s remaining shares, taking full ownership with completion scheduled for 2 April 2013 (Agg-Net).

What is MQP’s role in the Barrow upon Soar crash? MQP supplied the ballast under contract to Network Rail that was being delivered to the worksite near Barrow upon Soar on 1 February 2008. The delivery lorry belonged to a franchised haulier to the supplier. The investigation blamed the lorry driver and Network Rail’s risk process, not the supplier (RAIB).

What is RISQS accreditation? RISQS is the Railway Industry Supplier Qualification Scheme, the UK rail sector’s supplier accreditation programme. It confirms that businesses working in rail construction and maintenance meet required safety, quality and compliance standards. MQP received the accreditation in September 2025 (Agg-Net).

What this profile does not claim

• It does not give MQP’s founding date, employee count, turnover or production tonnages, because no fully-read source verified them.
• It does not name MQP’s three quarries beyond the Cliffe Hill complex, which is the only site documented in fully-read sources.
• It does not claim MQP bore any blame for the Barrow upon Soar crash; the investigation’s findings were directed at the lorry driver and at Network Rail’s risk-management process.
• It does not treat the BEIS-funded route map as a completed decarbonisation: the funding covered a scoping study, and the net-zero ambition is the parent company’s stated goal.
• It does not assert the Cliffe Hill tunnel’s length, which no fully-read source confirmed.