Why Construction Matters
Construction accounts for over 6% of the UK economy. That doesn’t sound much, but it’s a lot bigger than other sectors with a far higher profile. Agriculture has not only a seat in Cabinet, but also two long running radio programmes, The Archers and Farming Today, to get its messages across.
There is also a popular TV series, Clarkson’s Farm. Agriculture is also more engaged. When farmers get angry they get into their tractors and besiege Parliament to get their story into the headlines. Construction has made determined efforts in recent years to get its messages across but must do more to overcome a lack of awareness and understanding.
Construction is vital to Britain’s prospects. It’s a key enabler for how we travel, live and work, a positive contributor to UK growth. Without enough homes in the right numbers in the right places, Britain gums up. People can’t move around the country to work, or when changing jobs. It’s harder for Enterprise to build businesses too.
Reading media headlines, news reports, and opinion pieces you’d think the UK was irredeemably incompetent, a sad basket case. True, our systems are so clogged up with self-imposed obstacles that construction costs and time to build escalate to an extraordinary degree. We take forever to build anything. In many developed countries that we compare ourselves with, it takes far less time and far less cost to build. Government could do something about that if it really wants Britain to grow.
Yet we should keep a sense of perspective and not talk our economy and markets down, when complaining about the state of Britain today. Growth is anaemic and we constantly fall short of expectations, but other developed countries face similar challenges. Some are doing less well and growing more slowly. In the G7 groups of companies, for instance, the US grew fastest in 2025 (+2.1%), with Canada a close second (+1.9). But the UK came third with +1.3%, comfortably ahead of Japan (+1.1), France (+0.8), Italy (+0.5), and Germany (+0.2%). You wouldn’t know that without digging behind the media or political knockabout. We are hyper-aware of our own challenges, but we don’t have to deal with the scale of collapse of Germany’s powerhouse auto industry, for example.
According to the Office for National Statistics, Services is the largest component of output, at 80%, but households account for just under 60% of national expenditure. How confident consumers are, and how confident they feel to spend matters hugely to the economy, and to the building materials supply chain. New Housing and RMI are the two largest construction sectors. That’s why consumer confidence matters so much to Construction and the country, and why talking our markets down is self-defeating.
