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Tag: house building

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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Examining the puzzles and concerns over the latest construction output figures

Examining the puzzles and concerns over the latest construction output figures

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…

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Why structural demographic challenges threaten house-building numbers

Why structural demographic challenges threaten house-building numbers

Much has been made of the latest English Housing Survey that shows homeownership among the young dwindling still further. It’s a corker for the media. It has generated reams of copy in the press and numerous discussions on TV broadcasts and radio phone-ins. But it ain’t news. A bit like the “ageing population problem”, the decline in youngsters owning their own homes was evident decades ago if you cared to look at the statistics. A favoured quip is that Margaret…

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Bright prospects ahead for construction. That’s the forecasters’ view

Bright prospects ahead for construction. That’s the forecasters’ view

UK construction by 2018 will have witnessed a five-year growth spurt not seen since the 1980s. That’s what is suggested by the majority verdict among the latest batch of industry forecasts. Taking Construction Products Association forecast numbers, from 2013 to 2018 the industry output will have expanded by a quarter. Only in the post-War era up to the 1960s and in the late 1980s did construction enjoy growth of that magnitude over a five-year period. This will, if it happens,…

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Déjà vu, predictability and the challenge to fill the construction skills gap

Déjà vu, predictability and the challenge to fill the construction skills gap

UK construction needs 44,690 new recruits a year for the next four years at least, says CITB following its Construction Skills Network research. Last year it put the estimated annual recruitment requirement at 36,400. The year before, it estimated 29,050. The pressure seems to be growing. Set this against the 7,280 apprentices completing in England in 2013 and the picture looks really rather depressing. It’s hard not to be maddened by the inevitability of this rapidly growing workforce problem. I’ve…

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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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Forecasts paint a brighter future for building, but infrastructure data clouds the picture

Forecasts paint a brighter future for building, but infrastructure data clouds the picture

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)…

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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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