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…
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…
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…
Last Friday the Office for National Statistics released final quarter data for construction output in 2014. It put growth for the year at 7.4%. This, according to the official record, followed slightly anaemic growth in 2013 of 0.4%. The suggestion from these figures is that construction took off rapidly in 2014. 7.4% growth is pretty tasty. But should we believe this version of recent history? My advice would be no. I suspect when the figures are settled later this year we…
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,…
A figure keeps cropping up that suggests the average age of a construction worker is in the 50s and the industry is getting older by the day. That makes for a good scare story. But is it true? The story came up again in a construction economics meeting I was at last week. One anecdote suggested the faces on site looked 10 years older than 10 years ago. Could this be real, the effects of recession-related stress on hard-working construction…
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)…
Last week’s ONS construction data release caused a few ripples when it showed output dipping in August. It also sparked some sharp criticism from Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit – the people that bring you the PMI surveys. The second paragraph of his commentary reads: “We question the value of the official construction data due to the scale of revisions that occur after data are first release. The signals about the health of the sector and the economy as…
The latest official output data from the Office for National Statistics show growth apparently stalling in the second quarter. This may seem at odds with trade surveys and media commentary which tend to point to construction booming. It’s not really. Despite the zero growth recorded by ONS for output in the second quarter of this year, at the risk of doing a Michael Fish, I think we can be confident that the industry is pretty much set on an upward…
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…