Well the phone has stopped ringing so much,customers just dont want work doing,all the trade stores are empty,when you meet a fellow tradesman the first question is usually hows work, and the answer quiet.
Kitchen,tile and bathroom fitters seem to have all disapeared, along with plumbers in Volkswagen vans.

So whats everyone spending money on, or are they just saving it, the only ones with money to spend lately are the pensioners,and strangely they usually give you a few quid as a tip.

What the future for construction and building /refurbishment is going to be for the future who knows.

+1 in other sectors

My brother in law is in construction, he's decided to pack in his company and go and work for a larger firm things have got slow. I'm in east london which is doing ok I think of it as an emerging market. Go wherever the cranes are.

Customers just are not spending on maintance, or preventive maintance, so things are getting rotten, and then its a bigger cost to replace,and then they cant dont want to pay as they havent got the turnover to pay for the replacement.

awful here

Very busy indeed here (mostly B2B PR) but my Dad (does period house interiors) has had a very quiet patch.

Strange one here. As I type this, all I can hear is the builders across the road. You can't get down our road there are so many builders vans. A mate of mine is a builder and says he has never been so busy. People seem to be upgrading their houses rather than buying bigger.

Bad here, but I was after a general builder yesterday for about £5k of work as my regular guy is away, took at least twenty calls to folk with ads in the phone book to get two guys to agree to come and quote, and neither of them have arranged a time to come and look see. I reckon with a lot of trades getting the ads and contact numbers/forwarding to mobiles etc. right in the first place would keep you ahead of the pack.

Keeping out of this one for superstitious reasons!

Re builders – if I were a builder and wanted to get ahead, I'd have a decent website!

A massive chunk of people are becoming house buyers/modders who've hardly ever had to look in a Yellow Pages or classified section. They just use Google.

Yep, it's amazing how builders etc. don't seem to have caught on to the internet. I can see individuals who work off reputation being ok, but we moved to an area and needed a builder and we googled first.

Also get a permanent address for the business and a landline. Phoning "Jim" on a mobile didn't really inspire confidence when we were spending 20k so we didn't.

curtisthecat – Member

Strange one here. As I type this, all I can hear is the builders across the road. You can't get down our road there are so many builders vans. A mate of mine is a builder and says he has never been so busy. People seem to be upgrading their houses rather than buying bigger.
Exactly the same here!

Our business has been very busy all year & all the engineering firms I use are stacked out with work as are all their suppliers, and the lead times on parts or installation is much greater due to high demand?

I'm in the print trade and things are just plodding along at the minute. Most customers are ordering tha bare minimum. There seems to be a spate of printers going under again after things seemed to have calmed down.

So whats everyone spending money on

What is this 'money' of which you speak?

I'm fine at the moment. In fact recently my subbie has leant on me to work the odd Saturday (which is something I intensely dislike) because they have been so overwhelmed with work.

Today when our surveyor came on site I told him that I might struggle to keep going as a result of waiting on other trades, scaffolding to be altered, etc, he said not to worry as they had plenty of other sites they could send me to – which was nice to hear.

Actually it wasn't that nice as the site I'm on moment is less than a mile from where I live 🙂

But of course we are not in recession, and none of this will last when we actually go back into recession.

The previous government managed fairly successfully to protect many jobs from the very worst of the global recession. Construction ended up not suffering anywhere as much as it has in previous recessions.

I fear that the recession which the UK is almost certainly about enter, will have a far more devastating effect on construction. The present government has no commitment to protecting jobs, only to dismantling the role of the state and low taxation.

Still when I'm out of work, I guess I will be paying a lot less tax. So the present government will at least have succeeded in reducing my tax bill – if nothing else. And I suppose it's a matter of opinion whether or not we need new/upgraded hospitals, schools, homes, etc.

Cutting public sector construction projects could cause up to 68,000 additional job losses and risks plunging the construction industry back into recession, the CITB-ConstructionSkills and Sector Skills Network (CSN) have warned the Government.

I out my graphic design business into receivership earlier on this year after a couple of clients going bump owing serious money, then my regular contracts cancelled with no notice. Everyone I know in my game is in the same boat. To be specific: F**KED!!!

Welcome to the double-dip recession. Right around the corner from where you're stood now. Bank lending to business down to historically low levels. So where is this 'private sector expansion' to balance the slashing of public services? In George Osbourne's stupid ****ing head, that where

TO quote cressers: we're all doomed. The next economic figures to be published will be absolutely catastrophic!!

Doesn't seem to have been widely appreciated that public sector cuts have a big impact on private sector. Hate to think about impact of say stopping Building Schools for the Future on building trade and suppliers when multiplier effect is taken into account.

Since the government pulled the plug on "Building Schools for the Future" my work has pretty much dried up. People in the industry I speak to are more concerned now than 12/18 months ago.
Some of the school's that have had their new builds mothballed are in a desperate state (no heating, glass falling out of windows, knackered plumbing etc)and will need demolishing so I believe that the school building programme will resurface under another name. Fingers crossed!

Industrial construction around here is dead, not built anything industrial for nearly 2 years, so much availability to rent warehouse space with square footage rates at an all time low, why would you build when you can rent??
So yes affected me as no pay rise and no bonus for 2yrs now!!

Yep, I work in Telecommunications infrastrucutre, arguably a utility business some would say – its quiet to the point of total silence.

I cant help but wonder how much of the world economy is based on the design/manufacture/supply/sale/support of goods and services that- when push comes to shove- no-one really needs?

Most if not all suffer in Recession-knock on affects all not just builders.

Fingers crossed it gets better but like so many who have sold their business-best not wait and act asap.

Good luck and keep your heads up!

….affected me as no pay rise and no bonus for 2yrs now!!

Lucky you. I am on exactly the same rate as I was at the time of EU enlargement over 6 years ago, when Brown/Blair cynically exploited the situation presented by unemployed East Europeans, to flood the UK market with cheap labour.

i work in a engineering firm, we make shiney things for offshore, tunnel, marine…. it has gone quiet, were just ticking over, but our market is bespoke and we've been going for 30 years so the name is keeping us going.

there's still lots of enquiries but most jobs/future orders are 'on hold because of the current climate' if i had a pound for eveyrtime i heard that.

it is scary times indeed, each day i wake up i stop myself moaning and just be glad i have a job!

Yep…also in construction and our firm has bugger all orders on its books even though we have been doubling all efforts to provide seriously competitive quotes on our tenders, to the point where we are actually spending a bloody fortune in bid preparation just to try and get a foothold over the competition and most of it is coming to nothing. We have just lost two really decent "in the bag" projects due to the flipping spending cuts being enforced on public sector projects plus a further blow was dealt when Network Rail bailed out of a project that we spent 6 months quoting for them. In contrast though….I do a fair bit of private electrical work for a mate who fits kitchens and bathrooms and he seems to keep me pretty busy, plus I get a lot of calls from old customers etc wanting smallish electrical work doing so there is work out there….and screw/electric fix seems pretty rammed when I venture in there so maybe it's just the medium to large business that is getting hammered??

Trouble that I can see in the construction industry, is that it won't be the best businesses/workers that will survive, it will be the cheapest. With so many cheap but good East European workers leaving in droves and very little qualifications needed in the trade, I can for see the possibility of really shoddy work proliferating, worse than it is now. Actual standards of craftsmanship are at an all time low, as the priority is for jobs to be completed as quickly as possible and too many corners are being cut. This will ultimately lead to things having to be fixed/done again, which will ultimately cost more. There seems to be less and less pride in the work these days.

When, if, the double dip happens, it's going to hit 'us' harder than the over exaggerated recession reported in the media last year.

I'm in the education sector and for the first time ever there were no jobs advertised in the North East for science teachers in the final term.

Not one of the timeserved teachers at work has ever seen this before. People are scared to retire and scared to move on to pastures new.

GG – If it makes you feel any better, I too am charging exactly the same hourly rate as I was in October 2006.

I just might dibble the timesheet a bit to allow for inflation 😉

Actual standards of craftsmanship are at an all time low, as the priority is for jobs to be completed as quickly as possible and too many corners are being cut.

You obviously don't understand what effect recession/lack of work has on construction. Clients want rock-bottom prices for work done to Buckingham Palace standards.

very little qualifications needed in the trade

You obviously don't know about CSCS cards.

40% of all landfill is waste from the building trade. A totally unsustainable industry that needs a radical rethink along the lines of renovation not demolition. Of course it won't because there's less dosh to be made by larger contractors.

GG – If it makes you feel any better, I too am charging exactly the same hourly rate as I was in October 2006.

It does actually Stoner ….. thanks 8)

Although I have to confess that for a period around 2006, my rate did go up for about a year or so, but then went back down to it's 2004 level. So now I'm earning less than I was 4 years ago 😐

Ernie,
the cscs card is just a health and safety card that employers ask for so that their arses are covered if someone hurts them selves by fault of their own incompetence, it takes about 5 minutes and is multi choice, not what I would call a skilled trades qualification. To be fair I have noticed a big rise in the need for a degree qualified engineers, when I started you just had to have enough relevant experience but now a consultancy wont even look at you without degree papers.

Clients want rock-bottom prices for work done to Buckingham Palace standards.

No, developers want the cheapest deal they can get, take their money, then sod off leaving the problems to emerge later. Local authorities, with ever-shrinking budgets, end up having to hire the cheapest contractors who in turn hire the cheapest workers they can get, who do the poorest quality work. A mate had his bathroom tiled in his council flat by some useless shyster who didn't even know what a plumb-line was, and had to borrow half his tools from my mate! The job was so poor, my mate kicked the bloke out, tore all the tiles down and started again. As the feller had skimped on the adhesive, they all came off really easily. Sadly this sort of thing isn't that uncommon.

You obviously don't know about CSCS cards.

Neither do lots of workers in the building trade…

Resigned from my Planning job to move back north when wife had second kid, thought I'd be out of work for 6 months max, now nearly a year and the Planning sector is decimated. Very low new construction projects, councils slashing budgets and a Tory government who'd love to see the Planning system massively scaled back, I really cannot see when things will change. On top of that, the wife couldn't get a job back up here so has had to go back to her old job in London, not nice for a mum who only gets to see her 4 yr old and 9mth old every other weekend.

Thoroughly depressing!!!

I'm presently free-lancing and, at best, I'm getting the same hourly rate as i was getting 7 years ago. Some clients just point bank refuse to pay it and drive it down by about 25%. They know your going to take it. If ouy don't there are plenty of people who will.

Still want the same work doing, to the same standard, to the same ridiculous deadlines, but want to pay 25% less. I was hardly overpaid 7 years ago!

Trouble that I can see in the construction industry, is that it won't be the best businesses/workers that will survive, it will be the cheapest. With so many cheap but good East European workers leaving in droves and very little qualifications needed in the trade, I can for see the possibility of really shoddy work proliferating, worse than it is now. Actual standards of craftsmanship are at an all time low, as the priority is for jobs to be completed as quickly as possible and too many corners are being cut. This will ultimately lead to things having to be fixed/done again, which will ultimately cost more. There seems to be less and less pride in the work these days.

This kind of attitude will lead to one thing – no work.

You can't just moan, you have to adapt and survive. Anyone that buys just on price is a mug.

There are plenty of top quality craftsmen (and women) getting work in the trade.

As for CSCS cards – mine expired recently and was about as hard to pass as a small and slippery turd.

Would it be difficult to migrate to places such as India or Dubai where construction is in demand? or even Oz?

A friend who was laid off 6 months ago as a manager and was upset he couldn't find any work etc now has a driving job and he's happy as hell 😀

I still think Eastern Europeans are still here and it could be the ultimate plan by stopping industries they want to work in by the Conservatives.

In the mean time hire a JCB and knock down a few buildings when empty like the council building and some schools-leave a business card they'll have to hire you then! actually don't do that its wrong…

Ernie,
the cscs card is just a health and safety card……

Erm, no. My CSCS card has my qualifications printed on the back. Obviously a general labourer's CSCS card would not necessarily state any qualification. But anyone seeing your CSCS card would know whether or not you have qualifications and what they are.

.

You obviously don't know about CSCS cards.

"Neither do lots of workers in the building trade…"

It's been a very long time, in fact several years, since I was last on a site which allowed anyone to work without CSCS cards.

Cheer up though chaps. All the banks look like they're back to rude health and profit after swallowing up all our cash.

So we're back to the wonderful sight of bankers trousering obscenely large bonuses, guffawing into their vintage wine and ordering new Bentleys as they watch the proles disappear into a mass of debt and unemployment, while being shorn of their public services

Isn't capitalism brilliant!!!!!

Ernie, is a CSCS card a real indication of the quality of the worker though? No.

Sorry, but standards have definitely declined. Poor quality materials are often substituted for decent stuff. Especially in local authority projects. Less and less is built to last. I've seen stuff that makes 70's council estates look well-built.

As for CSCS cards – mine expired recently and was about as hard to pass as a small and slippery turd.

Why do people not understand what a CSCS card is ? It is only the health and safety aspect which needs to be retaken – not the qualifications. My card says on the front, quote :

"The registered holder of this card holds the construction qualifications listed on the reverse"

Here check this :

BLUE CARD – SKILLED WORKER
Top

You may qualify for a blue skilled card if you have achieved an NVQ or SVQ level 2 or if you have completed an employer sponsored apprenticeship which included the achievement of a City and Guilds of London Institute Craft Certificate.

If you do not have these qualifications, you may apply for a skilled card if you are experienced in your job (see Experienced Worker Card for more information)

All applicants must pass the ConstructionSkills health and safety test.

BLUE CARD – CRAFT UNIT LEVEL

This route is for occupations where a full NVQ or SVQ does not exist, but trade specific units do.

All applicants must pass the ConstructionSkills health and safety test.

This card is valid for five years.

To apply for a CSCS Blue Card click here

GOLD CARD – SKILLED WORKER
Top

You may qualify for a gold skilled card if you have achieved an NVQ or SVQ level 3, or if you have completed an approved indentured apprenticeship (e.g.with NJCBI, BATJIC etc.) or an employer sponsored apprenticeship which included the achievement of a City and Guilds of London Institute Advanced Craft Certificate.

If you do not have these qualifications, you may apply for a skilled card if you are experienced in your job see Experienced Worker Card for more information.

All applicants must pass the ConstructionSkills health and safety test.

http://www.cscs.uk.com/types-of-cards#MoreRedt