Construction output in Great Britain: April 2023

• Monthly construction output is estimated to have decreased 0.6% in volume terms in April 2023; this follows two months of consecutive growth.

• The decrease in monthly output came from a decrease in new work (1.0% fall), with a small offset from an increase in repair and maintenance (0.1%) on the month. 

• At the sector level, five out of the nine sectors saw a fall in April 2023, with the main contributors to the monthly decrease being private housing repair and maintenance and private housing new work, which decreased 5.7% (£149 million) and 3.0% (£99 million), respectively.

• Anecdotal evidence suggested a continued slow-down in private housing, referencing economic worries with customers hesitant to request work; despite this, similar to last month, some companies across other sectors have again reported an easing in inflation.

• Alongside the monthly decrease, construction output saw an increase of 1.6% in the three months to April 2023; this is the eighth period of consecutive growth in the three-month-on-three-month series; the increase came solely from a rise in repair and maintenance (5.7%), as new work saw a decrease of 0.9%.

• The largest positive contributor to the increase in the three months to April 2023 was private housing repair and maintenance (7.1%); despite the large decrease on the month, this sector saw strong growth in the previous two months; non-housing repair and maintenance (4.6%) was the other main contributor to the three-month-on-three-month increase.

Construction output estimates

Construction output estimates are monthly estimates of the amount of output chargeable to customers for building and civil engineering work done in the relevant period, excluding Value Added Tax (VAT) and payments to subcontractors.

Seasonally adjusted estimates

Seasonally adjusted estimates are derived by estimating and removing calendar effects (for example, leap years such as 2020) and seasonal effects (for example, decreased activity at Christmas because of site shutdowns) from the non-seasonally adjusted estimates.

Value estimates

The value estimates reflect the total value of work that businesses have completed over a reference month.

Volume estimates

The volume estimates are calculated by taking the value estimates and adjusting to remove the impact of price changes.

Quality and methodology

More quality and methodology information is available in our:

• Construction output QMI

• Construction output price indices (OPIs) QMI

• New orders in construction QMI

Reasons for revisions to construction output in this release

In line with the national accounts revision policy, there are no revisions to previously published data, and April 2023 is being produced for the first time.

For further information on the revisions profile, see our Output in the construction industry revisions triangle (one-month growth) dataset and our Output in the construction industry revisions triangle (three-month growth) dataset.

Sub-national and sub-sector construction output

Data on new orders supplied by Barbour ABI, as shown in our Quality assurance of administrative data used in construction statistics methodology, are used to model the breakdown of the overall output figures for Great Britain into the lower level and regional data, as shown in Tables 1 and 2 of our Output in the construction industry: sub-national and sub-sector dataset.

Bias adjustment

Typically, since the move to monthly gross domestic product (GDP) estimates, an adjustment to address any bias in survey responses for construction output is applied to the early construction output monthly estimates. This is shown in our Improvements to construction statistics: Addressing the bias in early estimates of construction output, June 2018 article.

Response rates for April 2023 showed improvement compared with levels in recent years since the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. However, we have continued not to apply a bias adjustment for April 2023 while we review this approach going forward.

Differences with monthly GDP construction estimates

In Blue Book 2021, a new framework was introduced in our Producing an alternative approach to GDP using experimental double deflation estimates article. This improves how we produce volume estimates of GDP for balanced years as part of the supply use process. This framework included the implementation of double-deflated industry-level gross value added (GVA) for the first time. This improvement was reflected in our GDP quarterly national accounts, UK: April to June 2021 and GDP monthly estimate, UK: August 2021 for the first time.

As a result, volume estimates in the monthly GDP and construction outputs releases will differ for the period 1997 to 2020. This is because the construction publication measures the volume of construction work (output), while the GDP series measures GVA (that is, output minus intermediate consumption). Construction estimates will align, however, from January 2021 onwards on a growth basis.

Information and indicative effects of this change to industry-level GVA volume can be found in our Impact of double deflation on industry chain volume measure annual estimates article and our Impact of Blue Book 2021 changes on quarterly volume estimates of gross domestic product by industry article.

Publishing content review

This release is a headline-only bulletin. We are currently reviewing the content we publish and are trialling a system of a full bulletin release on quarter months, with headline-only releases on the other two months of each quarter. There will be no change to the accompanying data and we will continue to publish all of our usual set of data tables every month. We will announce a decision in a future release and welcome any feedback at construction.statistics@ons.gov.uk.