The Construction Products Association’s has published its State of Trade Survey, indicating a slight improvement for construction product manufacturers during Q1, even though the longer term outlook is still uncertain.
These figures conflict with last month’s official ONS statistics for construction and confirm the serious doubt expressed by the Association at the time.
The ONS figures indicated a 0.5% rise in GDP but a fall in construction output of 4.7% for the first quarter of 2011. Despite an overall growth in the economy the Association expressed concerns over the suggested size of the fall in construction output as the industry has shown some signs of improvement since the start of the year.
Commenting on the figures, Construction Products Association Economics Director, Noble Francis said: “The survey highlights that the situation for construction product manufacturers remained challenging in the first quarter of 2011 yet this is a considerable improvement on 2010 Q4 which suffered greatly from the impacts of the bad weather in November and December. 48% of manufacturers reported that sales of construction products rose in 2011 Q1, compared to just 14% in 2010 Q4. Yet the scale of the fall in the official figures is extremely surprising and inconsistent with information from this survey and anecdotal evidence from the industry.
“Given that we are yet to see the full effect of the public spending cuts, in the near term we do not expect that private sector construction will be sufficiently strong to compensate for these cuts. As a result, the Association’s latest construction forecasts anticipate that output in the industry will fall in 2011 and 2012 before it sees any significant growth in 2013”
