The firm has identified justice, health, education and local government as target areas in coming years.

Ruby McGregor-Smith, chief executive of Mitie, said: “We are investing in contract tendering opportunities that have the potential to grow the group’s public sector revenues considerably, with the earliest resultant contract awards expected to be made from Spring 2011 onwards.

The firm is tendering for a broad range of new outsourced services covering prisoner escorting, community service and facilities management services to the Ministry of Defence.

It has also been selected as the FM contractor for the Office of Government Commerce framework, which will open the door to FM service deals across all central Government departments.

In the private sector, Mitie has signed an £80m FM deal with Vodafone covering the telecoms giants UK properties.

Growth at the Facilities Management and Technical Facilities Management division helped drive group profits forward, up 12% jump to £47.5m in the first half of the the year. Revenues rose almost 15% to £919m.

However, McGregor-Smith warned that the Property and Asset Management divisions were still experiencing challenging market conditions in their more cyclical, construction-related markets.

She added: “Overall, market conditions in the medium term remain positive for outsourcing.

“Our integrated models offer innovation and provide tangible evidence of the cost and carbon efficiencies that we can achieve to meet the demands of both our public and private sector clients.

“We retain our focus on our strategy of delivering sustainable, profitable growth and are confident that full year earnings will be in line with management expectations.”