You don’t need a map, satnav or signposts to drive a car from one place you know to another you don’t. But it helps. A guide is handy. It supports better choices. It saves time. So, too, can good industry statistics. You don’t need them. But a good set of numbers can help to scale your market and provide hints at where it’s heading. Even fairly ropey stats and indicators help. This brings me to the latest ONS release of…
The Office for National Statistics output figures released on Friday strongly suggest construction is heading for a technical recession. Put another way, recorded output will need major revisions or an exceptional boost in March if we are not to see two successive quarters of decline. The data suggest output in both January and February, when adjusted for inflation and seasonal factors, was lower than for any month since December 2013. On its current trajectory we are looking at a recorded…
The latest construction-sector labour market data is encouraging, if you are a worker that is. The data show the level of employment at the end of last year was at its highest since 2009. Unemployed former construction workers are now as thin on the ground as they were in the best of times before the recession. And wages appear to be steadily improving. The earnings data suggest total average earnings within construction were up 3.6% on a year ago. As…
Construction will see faster employment growth than any other of the six major business sectors, according to projections by UK Commission for Employment and Skills. Between 2012 and 2022 the average annual rate of expansion in the construction workforce is put at 1.4%. That compares with 0.6% for the economy as a whole (see top graph). Even when you look at the economy divided more finely into 22 sectors, construction still comes out third, after information technology and electricity and…
Here’s a question posed by the labour market figures: Why since the recession hit do we have more dealers in buildings and fewer people building them? From the heady pre-recession days there seems to have been a 17% expansion in employment among dealers in buildings while employment among builders of buildings has shrunk 20%? That seems to be what the employment data tables in the ONS labour market data release tell us. Despite talk of a strong revival in construction,…
The Government’s plan to commission, build and sell 10,000 homes at Northstowe just north of Cambridge have been heralded by some in the media as radical. It hasn’t been done since the 1970s. That anyway is a line taken by a slice of the media as it absorbs carefully-crafted press releases that complement the thin detail in the National Infrastructure Plan 2014. Unsurprisingly as we head deeper into the run-up to a General Election, the media was duly given some…
Just what has been the cost to construction of the recession? Could and should policymakers have made the slump in activity less painful? Were there better policy options? These questions need desperate attention. Mistakes were made. Bad and avoidable mistakes, in my view. Lessons must be learned. Construction is a strategic industry. Having a construction industry is not an option for any nation. That makes it special, like health, education or defence. Recessions can disproportionately hit construction. The damage, however, will…
The number of people employed in construction is up 3.3% on a year ago, according to the latest ONS Labour Market data. This finding underlines official data showing a steady rise of the industry from recession. Output in the second quarter was up 4.5% up on a year ago. The growth in workloads is solid, but by no means a boom-time level, and like output the rise in employment stalled in the second quarter. There are of course always reasons…
The latest official output data from the Office for National Statistics show growth apparently stalling in the second quarter. This may seem at odds with trade surveys and media commentary which tend to point to construction booming. It’s not really. Despite the zero growth recorded by ONS for output in the second quarter of this year, at the risk of doing a Michael Fish, I think we can be confident that the industry is pretty much set on an upward…
In business certainty is a good thing. It may be less exciting for the crisis-management junkies we seem to be in Britain, but it helps us be more efficient. There is however one certainty that is painful to experience. This is the certainty that an action or lack of action will lead to an unnecessarily destructive outcome. Today the RICS launched its quarterly construction market survey. Its headline: “Private sector continues to provide forward momentum.” It’s all pretty predictable stuff….