Unveiling half-year results this morning, the developer said it had established a long-term pipeline of sites that will deliver up to 10m sq ft of space, subject to planning.

Mark Allan, chief executive said: “We continued to prepare our pipeline in line with our objective to grow industrial/logistics development activity by up to 25% per year by 2020.”

He said that since revealing the new strategy a year ago, St Modwen had sold £635m of assets, improving its portfolio mix, reducing borrowings, and accelerating delivery of a substantial industrial/logistics and regional house building pipeline.

During the half-year St Modwen gained outline planning consent for a 1m sq ft scheme at Chippenham Gateway, next to junction 17 of the M4, and cleared planning conditions and finalised consents for a 0.2m sq ft scheme at Copthorne, Gatwick, adjacent to junction 10 of the M23.

St. Modwen Homes continued to see strong growth. The volume of units sold in the first six months increased 31% to 302 units (2017: 230 units).

Looking beyond 2018, Allan said that St Modwen Homes planned to deliver up to 25% growth in new home volumes per year over 2019-2021.

“We have started to roll out initiatives to improve our operating margin by c. 2-3ppt over the medium term, in part through optimising site coverage, but also due to improved efficiency from scale benefits and a range of other initiatives,” he added.