Construction output in Great Britain: August 2023

• Monthly construction output is estimated to have decreased 0.5% in volume terms in August 2023; this follows an upwardly revised decrease of 0.4% in July 2023, with the monthly value in level terms in August 2023 at £15,584 million. 

• The decrease in monthly output came solely from a decrease in new work (1.5% fall), partially offset by an increase in repair and maintenance (1.0%) on the month.  

• At the sector level, five out of the nine sectors saw a fall in August 2023, with the main contributors to the monthly decrease seen in private commercial and private new housing, which decreased 4.1% and 1.4%, respectively. 

• Alongside the monthly decrease, construction output saw an increase of 0.9% in the three months to August 2023; this came from increases in both new work (0.9%), and repair and maintenance (0.9%).  

• In line with the National Accounts Revisions Policy, this release gives data for August 2023 for the first time and incorporates revisions for all periods; revisions up to June 2023 are consistent with our Gross domestic product (GDP) quarterly national accounts, UK: April to June 2023 bulletin, published 29 September 2023.

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 (QMI) 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 Revisions Policy, this release contains revisions for all periods. The revisions up to June 2023 are consistent with those published in our Gross domestic product (GDP) quarterly national accounts, UK: April to June 2023 bulletin, published on 29 September 2023. 

Revisions in this release are a result of: 

• nominal data revisions, including revisions to the survey data 

• revisions to seasonal adjustment factors, which are re-estimated every month and reviewed annually 

• revisions to the input series for the OPIs 

Further information on the revisions profile is available in ourOutput in the construction industry revisions triangle – (one-month growth) dataset and our Output in the construction industry – revisions triangle (three-month growth) dataset. 

Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) review of GDP  

The OSR will shortly be completing a review of the practices around the preparation and release of information about revisions to estimates of GDP in our Impact of Blue Book 2023 article, released on 1 September. This will cover:  

• processes and quality assurance in making revisions to GDP 

• potential improvements to early estimates of GDP enabled through enhanced access to data  

• communication of revisions to GDP, the story behind the most recent set of revisions, and uncertainty in early estimates of GDP 

Sub-national and sub-sector construction output 

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

Bias adjustment 

Typically, since the move to monthly GDP estimates, an adjustment to address any bias in survey responses for construction output is applied to the early construction output monthly estimates. We show this in our Improvements to construction statistics: Addressing the bias in early estimates of construction output, June 2018 article.  

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

Differences with monthly GDP construction estimates 

In Blue Book 2021, we introduced a new frameworkto improve how we produce volume estimates of GDP for balanced years as part of the supply use process. This was explained 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 the GDP quarterly national accounts, UK: April to June 2021 bulletin and dataset and GDP monthly estimate, UK: August 2021 bulletin and dataset 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 (output minus intermediate consumption). Construction estimates will align, but on a growth basis from January 2021 onwards. 

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 our usual datasets every month. We will announce a decision in a future release and welcome any feedback at construction.statistics@ons.gov.uk.