Did you see the FT piece with the Barbour ABI figures? What do you think? A bit worrying don’t you think? That set of questions in various guises came at me a few times yesterday as I was sipping a cappuccino in a sunlit Covent Garden cafe and while lunching on tapas with an old friend in Soho. My rare treat of an away day from numbers was not to be. Still. My initial reaction was: the figures may look scary, but…
The latest survey of construction by the surveyors’ body RICS paints a generally brighter picture of the industry’s activity and prospects albeit with some rather dark patches. A crude summation might be that commercial and housing in London and the South East is doing “good”, while everything else and everywhere else is doing “average” or “bad”. Or to put it another, perhaps more cynical way, thank God for the bankers.
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 latest release of construction output data underlines the critical importance of examining the accuracy and timing of the data, both the new series and the old. Calculations show that even slight variations to the current data can have a profound impact on the message the figures are sending to policy makers and business users. This is partly because of the high volatility in the construction market and the timing of the severe weather last winter, which brought much of…
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 official figures for construction output suggest a leap of 8.6% in construction work in February following the recorded fall of 6.8% in January. What does this tell us?
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.
There’s further support for the argument that January wasn’t really as bad as the construction output figures might have us think.
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…