Construction plant hire prices jumped almost 4% in the third quarter of this year, according to the latest set of official figures for services producer prices.

The data suggests that prices are up more than 4.2% on a year ago. Less than inflation, but it that’ll be welcomed as good news for plant hirers.

It will however not be received so favourably by the contracting community which is already under severe cost pressures and struggling to hold their prices, it would seem from today’s RICS construction survey.

Before getting too carried away with the stats, the Office for National Statistics quite sensibly suggests this series should be treated with caution, given the level of reliability in the market coverage.

But chatting within the industry the figures do ring true with folk on the ground. The capacity of the plant firms has adjusted to meet the new market conditions and they are able to pass through a fair slice of their cost increases. Also the leap in prices suggested in third quarter figures fits with the typical seasonal pattern.

In addition to the services producer prices index for construction plant firms, the graph shows construction output for the UK from the Gross Domestic Product datasets and a quarterly average of the monthly rental and leasing activities series taken from the Index of Services, which the ONS kindly sent me.