INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the Q2 2025 edition of Construction Market Intelligence, RLB’s insightful, up-to-date guide to construction activity around the UK incorporating our quarterly tender price forecast.
The RLB Weighted Average Tender Price Index forecast uplift for 2025, as at Q2 2025, is:
3.22%
Previous quarter's forecast for 2025: 3.21%
Construction sector hopes for stability and direction ahead of Spending Review
With the events of April 2 – Donald Trump’s so-called ‘Liberation Day’ – having started a series of rollercoaster-like market movements around the world, with trillions of dollars being shaved from stock markets, followed by months of ‘will he, won’t he?’ in relation to the imposition and relaxation of tariffs, we know things can change very quickly in political and economic terms.
Apparently, what goes down must come up, and markets appear, at the time of writing, to be well on the way back to the highs of the turn of the year. Most dramatically, the recovery of the large tech companies has shown that they can bob back to the surface very rapidly after an iceberg-strike. Tech’s recovery brings with it the spice of continued and in fact expanding data centre growth, as AI development and uptake really starts to ramp up.
Bubbling away in the background remain the demands of, and demand for, trade deals between the US and other countries, or conversely, the spectre of renewed tariff wars. For the UK, the recently signed trade deal may be perceived as a boon overall, but may not have much of an impact on UK construction.
Of more direct relevance may be the forthcoming Spending Review on 11 June. This will set the scene for public sector priorities and therefore construction pipelines as well as being a backdrop for the Budget in the autumn.
The Chancellor will undoubtedly have some hard decisions to make, although hopefully the US-UK trade deal provides some basis for stability. Even so, levels of uncertainty remain elevated, and that is no encouragement of large-scale investment across the private sector, so public-private partnerships may be a tempting solution for both the public sector and the private construction sector.
