Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department is taking to support economic growth in the construction industry.

The wider construction sector, including products manufacturing and associated professional services, had a turnover of £370 billion, generating 9% of UK Gross Value Added. It also accounts for around 9% of all employment in the UK. To improve productivity and support growth in the sector, the Government will invest £170m from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund in the Transforming Construction programme, which will be matched by significant industry funding. Two competitions were launched in March, to create an integrated innovation hub to develop and commercialise digital and manufacturing technologies for the construction sector, and to create an active building centre that will develop new energy generation and storage technologies for use in buildings. These competitions will conclude in June. The Transforming Construction programme will also support a range of other R&D and demonstration projects.

In addition, Government has published the National Infrastructure & Construction Pipeline, setting out planned investments in infrastructure and construction over the next ten years, to provide the industry with certainty about levels of investment, and to encourage it to invest in skills and new technologies to meet this. Further support for the modernisation of the industry will be provided by the presumption of offsite from 2019 adopted by 5 Government Departments. The Government and the construction sector are also working to develop a Sector Deal for construction, which will also support this objective. We aim to publish the Sector Deal this year.