The official figures show construction lost 67,000 jobs in the third quarter of this year. This is more than 1,000 jobs each working day and half the jobs lost to the UK economy over that period. So while there may be suggestions of more stability in the wider economy, construction is clearly still mired in a growing recession.
Practically all construction statistics are poor by comparison to the data in most other industries. It is not a fault of the statisticians or researchers. They have an unenviable job as the construction industry is, relatively speaking, very tricky to measure. So the best way to make sense of what is really going on it to look at a wide range of information and see what matches and what clashes and glean information wherever you can. Valuable insight into the…