2. Things you need to know about this release

The preliminary estimate of gross domestic product (GDP) for Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2016, published on 27 July 2016, contained a forecast for construction output of a fall of 0.4%. This estimate has been revised downwards by 0.3 percentage points within this release based upon further survey responses; output is now estimated to have decreased by 0.7%. This downward revision to construction output has no impact to 1 decimal place on GDP growth.

The release for June 2016 has a revision period back to April 2016. Revisions in this release were caused by the incorporation of late data. More information on revisions can be found in the background notes.

Output is defined as the amount charged by construction companies to customers for the value of work (produced during the reporting period) excluding Value Added Tax (VAT) and payments to sub-contractors.

Construction output estimates are a short-term indicator of construction output by the private sector and public corporations within Great Britain and are produced from a monthly survey of 8,000 businesses in Great Britain. The estimates are produced and published at current prices (including inflationary price effects) and at chained volume estimates (with inflationary effects removed) both seasonally adjusted and non-seasonally adjusted.

Chained volume measures are also described as volume. Construction output is used in the compilation of the output approach to measuring gross domestic product (GDP). Unless otherwise stated, all data referred to are volume estimates which are seasonally adjusted.

Detailed estimates, along with a longer run of time series data, are available to download in the Output in the Construction Industry: June 2016 datasets. In these tables, you will find chained volume estimates back to Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 1997, and monthly estimates back to January 2010. Current price non-seasonally adjusted data are available back to Quarter 1 1955. More information on these statistics can be found in the Definitions and explanations article.

The data published in this release cover construction estimates for Great Britain. Construction output estimates for Northern Ireland can be obtained from the Central Survey Unit.

National Statistics status

On 11 December 2014, the UK Statistics Authority announced its decision to suspend the designation of Construction Output and New Orders as National Statistics due to concerns about the quality of the Construction Price and Cost Indices used to remove the effects of inflation from the statistics.

We took responsibility for the publication of the Construction Price and Cost Indices from the Department of Business Innovation and Skills (now the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) on 1 April 2015, introducing an interim solution for measuring output prices in June 2015 for all periods from January 2014 onwards. We are currently developing a long-term solution for the deflation of construction statistics.