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Tag: house builders

Just how fast is the construction industry growing?

Just how fast is the construction industry growing?

This is a question that’s puzzling plenty of experts in the field at the moment. The trade surveys suggest strong and continued growth. The official data suggests a slowdown recently. So let’s look at the muddle of data. The Construction Products Association earlier this week released the latest Construction Trade Survey, which pulls together a range of survey data from material suppliers, contractors, subcontractors and small builders. Its headline said activity had increased for eight straight quarters. Most of the…

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George, if you are dredging dodgy policy ideas from old blogs, get the timing right

George, if you are dredging dodgy policy ideas from old blogs, get the timing right

“20% discount on your first home announces PM” reads the press release headline describing one of David Cameron and George Osborne’s latest moves to keep their mitts on the tiller of power. Ostensibly it’s a new bold initiative to give a leg up to 100,000 wannabe first-time buyers. Desirable, you might think. In reality we all know it’s yet another policy aimed at a key but unsettled element of the electorate to ease fears about their potential or the potential…

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Restructuring stamp duty should provide a boost to housing, interesting timing don’t you think?

Restructuring stamp duty should provide a boost to housing, interesting timing don’t you think?

So the Chancellor’s big idea was a reform of the stamp duty land tax. Excellent. Certainly few people with an appreciation of either taxation systems or the housing market think SDLT is a good tax. The Mirrlees Review: A proposal for systematic tax reform, a highly-regarded document in tax circles, had this to say for it: “There is no sound case for maintaining stamp duty and we believe that it should be abolished.” It recommended it be replaced by a…

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Northstowe and why I am so angry with George Osborne

Northstowe and why I am so angry with George Osborne

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…

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Where I dream that Lyons are taming a political jungle strangling housing… and wake up

Where I dream that Lyons are taming a political jungle strangling housing… and wake up

The Lyons Housing Review was published today. After a speed read, I’m left pretty impressed with its analysis of the problems facing housing in England. Indeed, my spirits were lifted even as I read the contents pages by phrases such as “positive planning”, “greater transparency about the land market”, “proactive land assembly”. This is not yet another report where planning is portrayed as some evil dead hand restricting activity, but rather as it should be – a tool to get…

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Are we witnessing the start of another housing problem?

Are we witnessing the start of another housing problem?

There’s something, no lots of things, desperately disturbing about today’s stories (examples here and here) telling of Government panic over potentially unflattering house-building figures released just before the General Election. Where to start? Let’s start with “starts”. These seem to be the housing figures in question. On 20 February I tweeted: “For those not familiar with the terminology: you live in a housing completion, you don’t live in a housing start” It was a jibe in response to a press…

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Is the deep-seated problem of housing supply really just about planning?

Is the deep-seated problem of housing supply really just about planning?

Does constraint on planning approvals restrict the supply of homes or does the demand for homes determine the level of planning approvals? Perhaps both work in tandem or parallel. These questions have bugged me for years. Here’s some fresh thought prompted by the release of the latest house-building figures and, in part, by concerns expressed over the weekend by Bank of England Governor Mark Carney about “a housing market that has deep, deep structural problems”. The housing market is a…

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Cracks are already appearing in the Government strategy on the building materials trade gap

Cracks are already appearing in the Government strategy on the building materials trade gap

The construction industry imports about 10% of its output value in building materials and seems to have done all my adult life at least. Admittedly the figures are a bit ropey, but the pattern looks pretty clear from the top graph. This is important, because the Government’s rather suspect industrial strategy (pdf) for construction has as one of its big targets a 50% cut in the building materials trade gap by 2025. Looking at the current data I reckon that means,…

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What brick and block shortage? What house-building boom?

What brick and block shortage? What house-building boom?

House building is enjoying its fastest growth for a decade or more and this is leading to shortages in the supply chain that threaten growth. That at least has become a widely accepted narrative that in many ways is characterising the current state of the construction industry. But is this really the case? The latest release by the business department BIS of the Monthly Bulletin of Building Materials and Components prompted me to scrutinise the data and various comments and…

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Don’t panic over construction output drop. The industry remains on a growth path

Don’t panic over construction output drop. The industry remains on a growth path

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…

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