Chatting to my good friend Martin Hewes about his latest regional forecasts he raised a point I had not really thought about that much before – the value of new orders for education work let over the past two years was twice the value for offices. In some regions the spending on education building makes the office sector look a bit like a side show. Great for those that specialise in educational building – well at least for the time being….
The economy is flatlining – that is the assessment we are encouraged to draw from the first stab at national output by the statisticians at ONS. The 0.5% growth in the first quarter of this year to counter the 0.5% snow induced fall in 2010 Q4 was very much in line with the consensus view among economists. So it will not come as a surprise. But the stagnation over the past six months implied by the figures is a blow…
The latest forecasts have been released for construction and, while it may not look like it, they are a shade more optimistic than they were at the tail end of last year. That said the picture remains broadly the same, with the industry heading into a second dip of recession before increased buoyancy in the private sector replaces falling public sector funding and drags construction back into growth.
The latest construction activity survey by Markit/CIPS suggests that the construction market remains pretty buoyant, with a monthly growth rate at 56.4 for March. This was above the long-term average of around 54. However, you should be a bit cautious before drawing the conclusion that the industry is in fine fettle from these figures. Not that many with a grip on reality would.
The Panorama programme due to be aired this evening is rightly getting a lot of publicity with figures showing that people’s earnings have fallen in “real” terms by about 5% during the past two years. But you really don’t need particularly detailed analysis to show how hard people’s earnings have been hit. As this blog has shown before, while pay has been hit hard in real terms, construction folk have taken a much heftier hit than most. Using the RPIX…
Construction job losses are starting once again to mount with a further 9,000 knocked of the number of workforce jobs in the final quarter of last year, as measured by the national statisticians. This means that at the end of 2010 there were about 2,128,000 construction jobs measured compared with 2,180,000 at the end of 2009 – a drop of just over 50,000. That takes the number of jobs lost from peak in September 2008 to 246,000, when numbers peaked…
You wouldn’t expect a sharp rise in new orders for construction to be a cause for concern – not in today’s work-starved economy. But that is just what we have. On the face of it the 18% jump quarter on quarter in the volume of work in the final three months of last year should be a reason to cheer. More work in the pipeline, yippee. And I suppose it is not unreasonable to see it that way. But sadly…
The latest data from the national statisticians ONS on services producer prices adds more concerns over rising inflation for contractors. The ONS’s services producer price indices provide data on price movements across a range of businesses, including plant hire, that provide services to other businesses. The recession in construction had driven plant hire prices down hard. But now it seems they are bouncing back as is clear from the graph below. Prices in the final quarter of 2010 were 2.2% up on…
There’s a long way to go before we know what will emerge from the unrest in the Middle East and North Africa. But what seems reasonable to assume is that it will different from the established order of top-down command, in many cases fuelled by oil money. How different things will be, who knows? Naturally it is unwise to rule out the possibility of the emergence of a more autocratic style of Government filling the power vacuums that are now…
The impact of the economic stimulus on construction is clear when we look at the phenomenal growth the industry enjoyed in 2010. The latest set of construction output figures put volume growth for 2010 at about 6.2%, although the amount of cash pocketed by the industry rose by just 3.8% as a result of falling prices. In volume terms this represents the biggest annual jump in output recorded since the late 1980s boom. And by the time the statisticians at…