I guess we knew what the headlines were going to be – and they haven’t disappointed…even if they are disappointing!
One trillion pounds - piled up next to an arctic....
In the commercial market in 2011 the value of UK commercial property investment transactions in Q4 2011 was £8.69 billion, down 25% on the same period for 2010. We were hit hard by the lack of liquidity in the market and by the Euro-Crisis.
UK house sales fell last year to 869,000, one of the lowest totals on record, HM Revenue & Customs has said. House price growth was just 1% – which in the circumstances was probably fairly good!
This seems to have been a long depression – the back end of 2008 was when we saw the writing on the wall – that is nearly 3.5 years ago. I don’t think we ever anticipated the market to flat-line for so long.
This week the UK reached £1tn (£1,000,000,000,000) in debt. To understand what one trillion looks like – go and have a look at your doormat – 1 Trillion of them would cover the whole of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Alternatively if you had spent £1m every day since Jesus was born, you would still have some change!
The really worrying thing is that there is little sign of a change in the short term. However, in the medium term I am involved in a number of major projects which could come to fruition in 2013-15. They have a long lead in, but I take some comfort in the fact that people are considering them. Of course this Parliament must be dissolved by May 2015, it is unlikely that the current incumbents will want to go to the Country with the current state of play.
Further I suspect that there will be some monies available starting next year. We will have the Olympics out of the way – I doubt we will ever know how much that has cost us. The budget of £9.3bn is apparently robust, money we can ill afford in the current economic climate!
Perhaps it is better in the middle distance than we think? I hope so!
