Construction Statistics

A wide range of statistics that are currently available on the construction industry including value of output, new orders by sector, number of firms and total employment, insolvencies and construction output price indices.

Main points

• The value of construction new work in current prices in Great Britain experienced a record 16.3% fall in 2020 to £99,651 million after the record high of £119,087 million in 2019 as the impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic took hold; there were similar percentage reductions in both private and public new work.
• Construction new orders fell by 11.9% in 2020 to £55,631 million, reaching its lowest level recorded since 2013, driven down by the private housing, private commercial (mainly entertainment) and public other new work sectors; the only sectors with positive growth were infrastructure and public new housing, with the former seeing most notable growth in electricity and roads.
• 342,456 Value Added Tax (VAT)/Pay As You Earn (PAYE) registered firms were operating in the construction industry in Great Britain in the third quarter of 2020, a 2.0% growth compared with 2019; administrative lags in deregistering and closing firms may mean that some closures are not yet visible in these figures.
• Construction-related employees (excluding self-employment) for VAT/PAYE-registered businesses in Great Britain remained broadly unchanged in the third quarter of 2020 compared with 2019, totalling 1.4 million workers; while self-employed workers fell to 727,000 in 2020 according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) data from the Labour Force Survey.
• Construction saw a 36.6% annual fall in the number of recorded company insolvencies in 2020; this is a similar magnitude when compared with all industries.
• The all-work construction output price index saw a mixed profile of annual price growth in 2020; the first half of 2020 saw continued declines in annual growth from 1.8% in January 2020 to flat (0%) growth in July 2020 with successive increases in the second half of 2020 to 1.7% annual price growth in December 2020.