Few industries have more experience of the sort of sharp fall in demand being unleashed by the Covid-19 pandemic than construction. It is a measure of how battle hardened the sector is that the latest UK Construction Purchasing Managers’ Index – the first economic data to show the crisis’s full impact – reveals that while construction activity plunged in March, the decline was still not as bad as that seen during the 2009 recession.

Construction enjoys another dubious honour: in 2019 it suffered the highest number of company insolvencies of any industrial sector. Across England and Wales, almost 3,200 construction sector firms went to the wall last year, with the attrition rate picking up in Q4.