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 batch of construction industry forecasts out this week paint a brighter picture of growth for building in Britain, but a confused picture for prospects in the infrastructure sector. I’ll turn to the confusion later, but for now it’s safe to say that, taken as a whole, the forecasts reflect and seem to support the general improvement in confidence within construction. Despite recurring concerns over persisting fragility within the global economy, Europe in particular, the Construction Products Association (CPA)…
Here’s a prime example of why it’s important to use a range of measures and timeframes rather than one single stat when using statistics as a tool to examine or describe whatever you’re interested in. The headline figures from the latest construction statistics say that construction grew in the final quarter of 2013 by 0.2%. This compares with the earlier estimated 0.3% fall released when the first estimate of GDP was published late last month. Looking simply at this changed…
Don’t panic. Construction is still growing. The first estimate of gross domestic product may show that quarter on quarter construction output was down 0.3%. But there’s no reason to suggest underlying growth has stalled. Getting obsessed with a single quarter’s figures, let alone a single month’s figures in construction is a bit… well… obsessive. The graph shows clearly how erratic monthly data are and how, even averaged over three months, the figures still bounce quite a bit. Looking at this…
Two more construction forecasts came out over the past week that added to the consensus that suggests construction is set for strong growth up to the General Election. Indeed, with the exception of the Hewes forecast, the view is that strong growth will continue well after 2015. The Hewes forecast tends to embrace more of the downside risks and in that respect charts a more cautious approach to potential growth. On that basis it seems reasonable to assume that it…
The annual turnover of the construction industry is about £1.5 billion bigger than we thought it was last month and it is growing much faster. That really is the big story from the latest estimate of construction output made by the Office for National Statistics. This is pretty big news. It means that the estimate for GDP will be boosted by about 0.1% as a result of the revisions to the construction output data. So we should expect to see…
The latest construction output data shows the industry is growing, but a little less quickly than the earlier official estimate and significantly less than some surveys suggested. According to the figures output in the third quarter rose 1.7%, compared with an earlier estimate of 2.5% provided with the GDP figures released late last month. Broadly speaking this is of no great consequence. The key point is that activity has now increased for two successive quarters and there’s growing confidence that recovery…
Construction industry forecasters have been busily upgrading their forecasts in the light of a turnaround in industry fortunes since Spring. Despite all raising their expectations for the future path of construction, at first glance the forecasts from Construction Products Association, Experian and Hewes appear to be telling very different stories. That certainly seems to be the take-away message from the graph. In some ways they are telling different tales, but in reality there’s more similarity than meets the eye. One…
The latest construction output figures provide yet more reasons to suspect that the industry may be pulling itself out of its slough. This evidence is reinforced by the release of the newly-constituted new orders figures. The construction output data for July show the index of construction activity has risen to its highest level since last October. This measure, which is seasonally adjusted and deflated to account for price changes, stood in July at 95.5 against 100 in 2010. This may…