I confess to having borrowed the following blog from Geoff Tily on the TUC's Touchstone blog but it seems pretty important to me because it suggests, appropriately in my opinion, that the short lived Osborne growth spurt is over:
Construction output fell -2.6% between December 2014 and January 2015, the fourth monthly decline in the past six months.
The main factor behind the decline in January was a sharp fall in house-building of -5.1% on the month. There has been only one larger monthly fall in house-building since the coalition took office (-6.6% in October 2011).
Compared with the same month a year ago, total construction output fell by -3.1% in January, down sharply from +5.3% in December, and the worse figure for nearly two years (since March 2011).
Construction, annual growth
With manufacturing also falling into January, these first glimpses of activity in the first quarter are not encouraging.
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And the weather has been pretty good, so that can’t be blamed for the fall.
Hence the rabbit out of the hat no doubt?
As I work in housing development, may I raise a few points that what may be seeing is a result of the reporting mechanisms themselves or even the development processes?
Are the figures for housing construction output based on starts or completions? If the latter, there may be plenty of yet unfinished properties out there.
Also, building houses (whether starts or completions) around winter is always the worst time to be on site due to weather and temperature variations which impact on technical aspects of the build (foundations and external coatings tend to suffer). So developers do try to avoid timing builds at this time of the year if they can.
However, I by no means wish to put a silver lining on Osbourne’s ‘grow spurt’. It may indeed turn out to just be a growth ‘splurt’.
Looking at the bizarre way he has tried to ‘encourage growth’ (stripping out buying capacity via a low wage economy & reductions in benefit; more reliance on debt) I’d agree that this is what we are beginning to see.
And I note that petrol/diesel prices are creeping up once again.