LONDON, May 7 (Reuters) – British builders saw one of the biggest month-on-month jumps in cost inflation on record in April, according to a survey on Thursday that also \u200cshowed the Iran war increased delivery delays and other supply chain difficulties.<\/p>\n
The S&P Global \u200cUK Construction Purchasing Managers’ Index’s measure of input cost inflation leapt to 81.4, its highest since June 2022. The jump from \u200b70.5 in March was the second-biggest rise since 1997 when the data series began, only just shy of the 11-point jump from February to March.<\/p>\n
The headline construction PMI, which measures overall activity, fell to 39.7 from 45.6, its weakest since November and below all economists’ expectations in a Reuters poll.<\/p>\n
S&P said \u200caround 69% of survey respondents reported \u2060a rise in their input costs in April, up from 48% in the month before.<\/p>\n
“A rapid acceleration of input cost inflation was seen across the UK \u2060construction sector in April. Aside from the post-pandemic surge in input prices from early-2021 to mid-2022, the latest rise in purchasing costs was the steepest in three decades of data collection,” said Tim Moore, economics director \u200bat \u200bS&P Global Market Intelligence.<\/p>\n
The Bank of England is closely \u200bmonitoring measures of input prices and prices \u200ccharged by companies as it tries to gauge whether the inflation impact from the war will last long enough to require increases in borrowing costs.<\/p>\n
Businesses reported the most widespread delays in shipping times since December 2022, S&P said, as vessels were largely unable to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n
The conflict in the Middle East also hit new orders, which declined at the sharpest rate since \u200clast November.<\/p>\n
The pace of job-shedding also accelerated in April, with \u200bthe employment index at its lowest since December, as \u200bfirms cited less work and higher payroll \u200bcosts.<\/p>\n
Companies’ optimism about the coming 12 months dropped too.<\/p>\n
The construction PMI showed civil \u200cengineering and residential house-building were the biggest \u200bdrag on activity, while commercial \u200bbuilding contracted less severely.<\/p>\n
The wider all-sector PMI, which includes previously released services and manufacturing figures, rose to 51.5 from March’s 49.9, reflecting stronger services performance.<\/p>\n
A separate survey from the Royal \u200bInstitution of Chartered Surveyors, published earlier \u200con Thursday, showed construction activity in the three months to March was the weakest \u200bsince the three months to June 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic partially closed building \u200bsites.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Suban Abdulla; Editing by Joe Bavier)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON, May 7 (Reuters) – British builders saw one of the biggest month-on-month jumps in cost inflation on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30587,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1993,1259,13312,5,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-30586","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"tag-delivery-delays","9":"tag-inflation","10":"tag-input-prices","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116532483545804485","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30586\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}