Review of Construction Output statistics

The joint DTI/ONS review of construction output statistics was published 1 December 2004. This review was established in October 2003 in response to a revision to construction output that led to a large revision to the estimate of GDP growth for Quarter 2 2003, published in September 2003.

In February 2004, an interim report of this review was published. It indicated that further research was needed to explain the large fall in construction output in Q1 2003. The final phase of the construction review uncovered a processing error in the DTI's survey results for this period, and its correction will lead to revisions to DTI's published estimates of quarterly growth in the construction sector for both Q1 2003 and Q2 2003. This correction has the impact of changing the growth rates for Q1 2003 from -2.6% to +0.5% and for Q2 2003 from 5.3% to 2.1%.

The impact on GDP of these revisions to construction output growth is relatively small. If there were no other changes to construction output, or other GDP components, the effect of correcting the construction output data would be to revise the quarterly growth rate of GDP for Q1 2003 up 0.1 percentage points and to revise the growth rate for Q2 2003 down 0.1 points. Revised GDP data will be published in the Quarterly National Accounts release at 09:30 on 23 December, in accordance with National Accounts revisions policy.

View the Review of Construction Output statistics

This page last revised: Wednesday, 1 December 2004