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A builder, a brewer and a toymaker give their views on the latest GDP figures
For Norwich builder Michael Sparkes, it is the sheer length of the downturn in construction that has damaged business more than anything else. He said he has had to cut his employees' wages to stay afloat. "It's been extremely difficult to keep morale up, but we couldn't have continued without doing it," he said.
Sparkes is the managing director of Building Services (Easton), a construction company which turns over £2m a year in housebuilding, education, church restoration and commercial work.
"Over the last few years things have been dire. Work is very spasmodic, when people have the spare cash. Tendering prices are being squeezed lower and lower. The bigger contractors have also come down to our level, and are bidding low just to keep their men employed."
He estimates his turnover is 20% down on where it was in the boom years.
He has seen public sector work gradually decline over the last year, but he says there have been some glimmers of hope.
"In 2011, January, February and March were pretty dire. As the financial year-end approaches there is usually a glut of work as clients spend their remaining budgets, but that hasn't happened this year at all. Inquiries are now coming through a bit more frequently."
Sparkes, a member of the National Federation of Builders, has worked in the trade for 33 years, taking charge of his company in 1989 and immediately having to deal with a recession.
"That one was quite bad, but this one has gone on much much longer. It's difficult to sustain the loss of trade over that period."
Greene King boss Rooney Anand produced some of the best figures in the pub industry for years, showing like for like sales up 8.2% for the 17 weeks to Easter, but he counselled against reading too much into them. "I'm not one of these CEOs that takes all the credit for great results and blames the weather for poor results, I think you've got to be balanced about it," he said. The pub sector was among the hardest hit by the recession, which followed on from the 2007 sales-sapping smoking ban. Hundreds of pubs have closed in the last four years.
Much of the recent recovery, for Greene King and others, was linked to rising food sales. Beer sales, meanwhile, declined 3.8% in both pubs and supermarkets during the first quarter. Anand said: "People are saying, I'm not going to buy that new plasma screen TV, but a little luxury on a weekly basis in my local pub is not something I'm going to give up on – particularly if the weather's nice."
Asked if he believed an economic recovery was firmly established, Anand said: "I think we should wait. We should be encouraged, we should be optimistic, but we should also be cautious around what the rest of the calendar year will bring.
"There will no doubt be a lot of spending going on at the moment that, at some point, customers will rein in a little bit. I think most of the portents of doom are saying that it will be from the autumn onwards when the effect of public sector cutbacks and spending really start to bite - and the employment impact of that wherever there are regional centres of government employment."
Toy maker Wow said its growth has been clipped this year as worried consumers put the brakes on spending. The company's founder and managing director Nadim Ednan-Laperouse said trading conditions in the first quarter were more difficult than during the official recession, when demand for its traditional toys for toddlers held up: "The growth we wanted was just not there at all."
The London-based company, which sells through big names such as Toys R Us, Argos and Amazon, has been growing at 20-25% for the last four years but Ednan-Laperouse predicts 15% this year.