Nearly one in three building companies is expecting their workloads to fall this year, while more than half (56%) have seen a reduction in the amount of private sector housing work in the first quarter of this year, according to the latest state of trade survey from the Federation of Master Builders (FMB).
Richard Diment, director general of the FMB, said: “The results from our latest survey show that the building industry in still in recession. The majority of building companies are reporting lower workloads, with one in three expecting a further decline in the next three months.”
Half of all building companies (51%) reported an ‘alarmingly abrupt’ slowdown in the amount of public sector work, compared with 31% just three months ago, revealing that cuts in local authority budgets are already hitting a hard-pressed building industry – and with further cuts expected after the election.
Richard Diment said: “Prospects for employment in the construction sector are not good, with 55% of building companies not expecting to take on any new staff over the next six months. This is bad very news for school leavers looking to get a job in the construction sector this summer. We are now in serious danger of repeating the mistakes of the last recession in the early 1990s when thousands of young people were denied the opportunity to learn a trade, with the result that the construction sector suffered a serious skills gap when it did emerge from the recession in the mid 1990s.”
With the building industry responsible for 9% of the UK’s Gross Domestic Product, Diment argues that the political parties need to explain what they will do to support British builders. “A commitment to skills and training would be a start, as would cutting the regulations that small building firms have to cope with,” he said.
The Federation of Master Builders (FMB) is the largest trade association in the UK building industry, representing around 12,000 building companies. www.fmb.org.uk
