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New houses under construction with scaffolding, roof tiles and stacked bricks on a UK building site

Tiling Trade News: 3,841 Construction Firms Failed

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Three sets of official figures landed in the past fortnight, and they tell a consistent story: the work is still there in repair and refurbishment, but the new-build pipeline that feeds a lot of tiling contracts is thinning. Here is what changed, and what it means if you are quoting work this autumn.

Construction insolvencies climbed again in July

The Insolvency Service published its July figures on 18 August 2026. There were 1,931 registered company insolvencies in England and Wales, 5% above June’s 1,847 but 5% below the 2,031 recorded in July 2025. The split was 288 compulsory liquidations, 1,497 creditors’ voluntary liquidations, 124 administrations and 22 company voluntary arrangements.

Construction took 343 of those failures in July, up about 3% on both June’s 332 and the 332 recorded a year earlier. Over the 12 months to July 2026 the industry recorded 3,841 insolvencies, 17% of all cases where an industry was captured, and more than any other sector.

Why it matters to you: if you subcontract, the firm holding your retention is statistically more likely to fail than one in any other industry. Check the credit position of a main contractor before you commit labour to a long fix, and keep your applications for payment current rather than letting two months roll up.

Sources: Insolvency Service commentary, July 2026 and Builders’ Merchants News.

Output held flat, but new orders fell 11.8%

The ONS construction output bulletin, published on 13 August 2026, put total construction output up 0.3% in the second quarter against the first. New work grew 0.4% and repair and maintenance grew 0.2%. On a monthly basis June output slipped 0.1%.

The number worth reading twice is new orders, which fell 11.8% in the quarter, a drop of £1,232 million. Orders are the leading indicator: they are the work that reaches a tiler’s diary six to twelve months later. Construction output prices rose 1.9% in the 12 months to June, so there is little inflation cushion in a fixed-price quote.

Why it matters to you: repair and maintenance is the part still growing, which is where domestic bathroom and floor tiling sits. If your workload leans on new housing, the order book behind it shrank sharply this quarter.

Source: ONS, Construction output in Great Britain: June 2026.

Materials chiefs wrote to the housing secretary

On 19 August 2026 the Builders Merchants Federation and the Construction Products Association went public with a joint letter to Angela Rayner, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. Their line was blunt: “the industry does not have a supply problem, it has a demand and confidence problem”.

The letter warned that a sustained slump would push manufacturers and merchants to review investment plans, freeze recruitment and reassess production capacity, and that capacity is slow to rebuild once demand returns. The supporting numbers: merchant like-for-like value sales in May were broadly flat year on year, down 0.1%, while like-for-like volumes fell 5.8%. The CPA expects total construction activity to fall 3.3% across 2026, with private housing output down 10%.

Why it matters to you: flat value against falling volume is the signature of price rises masking a real contraction. Merchants are moving less material for roughly the same money, so do not read a stable invoice total as a stable market, and expect competition on price to sharpen.

Source: Builders’ Merchants News, 19 August 2026.

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