Michael Dall on ... 'Commercial sector slowdown'

摘要

Heading into 2017, the construction industry is proving resilient to the changes in economic conditions, specifically Britain's vote to leave the European Union. In the short term, the negative impacts have been shown to be short-lived, if there have been any at all. However, using this to conclude there will be no impact whatsoever is misguided. The fact remains that fundamentally nothing has yet changed, so one would not expect any transformation in output to have occurred either in the economy as a whole or the construction industry in particular. The latest statistics from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show the industry is experiencing fairly benign conditions at the moment. To be sure, output in November 2016 was 0.2% lower than October 2016, but this still represented a 1.5% rise on November 2015. The private housing sector remained the major component of this growth, with output 12.5% higher in November 2016 than 2015.