Construction output in Great Britain: October 2023

• Construction output saw a decrease of 0.3% in the three months to October 2023; this came solely from a decrease in new work (2.0% fall), as repair and maintenance increased by 2.2%.

• Monthly construction output is estimated to have decreased 0.5% in volume terms in October 2023; this follows an increase of 0.4% in September 2023, with the monthly value in level terms in October 2023 at £15,485 million.

• The decrease in monthly output came solely from a decrease in new work (1.7% fall), partially offset by an increase in repair and maintenance (1.3%) on the month. 

• At the sector level, three out of the nine sectors saw a fall in October 2023, with the main contributors to the monthly decrease seen in private new housing and private commercial new work, which decreased 5.2% and 1.2%, respectively.

• Anecdotal evidence suggested that heavy rainfall and strong winds led to delays in planned work in October 2023; a high number of comments from businesses noted the negative effect of storms specifically.

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, there are no revisions to previously published data, and October 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 ourOutput in the construction industry revisions triangle (three-month growth) dataset.

Office for Statistics Regulation review of GDP

The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) have completed a review of the practices around the preparation and release of information about revisions to estimates of gross domestic product (GDP) in our Impact of Blue Book 2023 article released on 1 September 2023. This review covered:

• 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

We have already started work looking into the recommendations of this review and will set out plans more fully during January 2024.

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 October 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 October 2023 while we review this approach going forward.

Differences with Monthly GDP construction estimates

In Blue Book 2021, we introduced a new framework to 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 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 bulletin and GDP monthly estimate, UK: August 2021 bulletin and datasets 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 our usual datasets every month. We will announce a decision in a future release and welcome any feedback at construction.statistics@ons.gov.uk.