For all those doom and gloom merchants who are convinced that the UK construction industry is heading into recession there is a little ray of sunshine appearing that will scare all those manic depressives off. I don’t know whether you have noticed but the only thing that is ever reported is bad news, if I didn’t know any better I would say the ‘establishment’ is always trying to make us worried about something.

Who remembers the hole in the O Zone all those years ago? If you remember we were all going to die because the O Zone had a hole in it and the sun was going to fry us like we’d all been on holiday to Chernobyl in our budgie smugglers for a week. Who remembers BREXIT? Again, if you remember if we voted for BREXIT the UK was going to turn into the zombie apocalypse and we were going to turn into some third world cesspit of a country as the rest of the world ignored us.

So, to counter this I would like to say all things are rosy in PES. As the UK largest stockists of Thwaites, Terex, Mecalac and Barford parts the month of August normally results in a dip in activities as for 4 weeks most companies have at least a third of the workforce on holiday, a lot of them coming down here to the west country. This August was different as we had our best ever parts sales in August and had our 5th best month ever with over £425,000 worth of dumper parts shipped out from Exeter. Parts are only ever purchased to be fitted on a dumper and not to be sat on a shelf somewhere so dumpers are still being used and would therefore say the level of utilisation was still buoyant. If PES are busy it must mean as an industry we are busy so I guess what I’m saying is don’t panic and pay too much attention to the noise that is surrounding us.

When you get home tonight instead of turning the news on and listening to the ‘we’re all going to die’ mob, stop and think about how your business is doing whilst having a cheeky cider sat in the garden. Undoubtedly we are having a bit of a down turn in some area’s but on the whole it isn’t that bad.

To summarise I would like to draw on the words of my barber for the last 30 years. Jim Stevens of Regent Style in Teignmouth is a wise old brummie and, when we were talking about the economy the other day,  came out with this:

‘Recession………..nah. What it is is that all the uber rich have sold all their shares at the top of the market and now need to crash the economy to buy them back again cheap so that their wealth increases. They do that by using the media.’

Now I reckon there is an element of truth in that!!!