The rapidly worsening headline figures for UK jobs are worrying enough for us all. It is a sobering thought to contemplate the pain of 100,000 fewer in fulltime employment and a leap of 140,000 in the number of unemployed over the three months to September.

The latest figures for the third quarter of this year show construction redundancies at a 10-year high (and that is as far as the current set of figures go back) with 31,000 jobs lost.

This figure underestimates the numbers of jobs lost, because of the high levels of self-employment and employment mobility within the industry. Next months figures may give us a better clue as to how many jobs the industry has shed.

And for many more construction workers now out of work there is a further concern, the number of vacancies is falling fast, down by one third since April.

The Government figures estimate that there are just 15,000 job vacancies in construction compared with 24,000 in April.

In terms of the number of people employed the vacancy rate is as low as it has been since the current count started in 2001, which probably means as bad as it has been since the previous recession.

It is hard to know how meaningful these figures are in real terms, but it is yet more evidence of the pain construction folk are already suffering as the industry’s workload shrinks.

Looking to the future and the skills base for construction when it pulls out of recession, the loss of jobs is a major concern.

Also, the full impact of the slowdown may well be underplayed in the figures, given that it is so hard to get a real handle on the number of foreign workers leaving the industry to return home.

Each skilled worker lost to the industry represents the loss of at least £30,000 needed to train someone to replace them (I estimated conservatively some while ago).

Once again, we are facing not just the waste of skills and the pain of redundancies now, but the giant cost of reskilling and attracting in talent when growth returns.