For much of the past six years, even so much as a cough from government on the direction of capital spending has been enough to attract the immediate attention of construction firms desperate for work. The public sector was the life raft that kept the industry's head above water in the early days of recession, with public work rising from 20% of the industry's output in 2008 to 29% in 2009, and 33% in 2010, according to data analyst Barbour ABI. Although the coalition brought with it swingeing spending cuts when it entered government that summer, the time taken for these to feed through to projects meant that the public sector continued to provide a large amount of the sector's work throughout 2011 and 2012, when it accounted for 30% and 27% of output respectively.
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