The economy is flatlining – that is the assessment we are encouraged to draw from the first stab at national output by the statisticians at ONS. The 0.5% growth in the first quarter of this year to counter the 0.5% snow induced fall in 2010 Q4 was very much in line with the consensus view among economists. So it will not come as a surprise. But the stagnation over the past six months implied by the figures is a blow…
The latest official figures for construction output suggest a leap of 8.6% in construction work in February following the recorded fall of 6.8% in January. What does this tell us?
There’s further support for the argument that January wasn’t really as bad as the construction output figures might have us think.
The latest construction output figures seem to confirm the need to be cautious over divining too much from one month’s data. The figures suggest that less work was done in January than in December, despite the shutdown of sites across the country due to heavy snow late last year. What’s more they are not that much better than the figures for January last year, which was also hit by bad weather. If the data provide an accurate representation of what…
Well there we have it. 2010 was another awful year for building new private homes in England with fewer than 81,000 completed, compared with almost 154,000 in the peak year of 2007. And look closer into the latest official house building figures and we see than in many of the English regions, particularly in the North, the level of private house building is now running well below half of what it was in 2007. When you add in the homes…
The figure for construction output within the latest “shock” GDP preliminary estimate figures showed construction output for the UK down 3.3% in the final quarter compared with the previous quarter. The release also estimated that the snow effect on construction alone caused a drop in quarterly GDP of 0.1%. Well did construction output fall by 3.3%?
Both buyers and sellers appeared to be fleeing the housing market in December, according to the latest housing market survey from the surveyors’ body RICS. The intriguing question is whether this was a freak result cause by heavy falls of snow or are we seeing a climate change in the housing market. Certainly the RICS points understandably to the bad weather as a factor in the results. But we will have to wait for later results to provide a firmer…
When we suffered a cold snap back in February last year I looked at the impact of the great freeze of 1962/63 on construction output. In a word it was huge. So, as I walked into work this morning chipper as a child as I trudge though inches of snow and took in the Christmas card scene, I wondered what was the effect of the cold snap in February on the figures and what might we expect the impact of…