On the one hand, the rush to complete millennium projects has boosted workload in the late summer – bringing with it a tightening labour market, skills shortages and inflation. On the other, firms are anxious about a tail-off in workload after the millennium.
The figures show that 70% of firms were working at greater than 90% capacity in the third quarter. Three months earlier, only 64% were. The consequence was that, over the same period, the number of firms reporting difficulty in recruiting skilled labour (minus those reporting a decrease) went from 29% to 59%. Inevitably, this had an impact on tender prices: 14% of firms said they were charging more in the third quarter; in the previous three months, a balance of 7% were actually lowering prices.
The figures for enquiries were static in the third quarter, with the result that only 26% more firms expected a rise in workload than expected a decline. This is a dramatic fall from the 46% that were expecting work to rise three months before.
