The view carries merit because housing investment creates more jobs, will save energy and should wins votes.

All good reasons it seems for focusing on domestic building. But it would be dangerously short-sighted to do this at the expense of major infrastructure projects.

Consider details of the expanding ripple of work emanating from the London 2012 Olympics. This brings to the surface some tangible evidence showing why major infrastructure projects are so vital to the UK construction industry.

So far more than 1,500 construction firms have directly picked up orders and more than 7,000 workers and engineers are at work.

The only thing that can be said to set the 2012 Olympics apart from other big infrastructure projects is the fact that somebody has taken the time to measure the positives.

Similar orders radiate from projects like Crossrail and the London Underground upgrade. In this week's article, the Case for Construction, both projects are expected to harness an extra £24bn in wider economic benefits. Even setting this gigantic sum aside, the direct impact of procurement spend alone - estimated at some £25bn - will reach firms and create jobs in UK regions far beyond the capital.

These are doom-laden times and major projects counteract the gloom. They exert their own power and ability to excite young people, they inspire us to develop new technologies and raise confidence throughout the economy.

That's why they should be viewed as an abosolute priority.

While we can all agree on the need for cuts to sort out the public finances, we must make sure they are the right kind.

Cuts must be targeted at the battalions of civil servants running bloated public services, not the millions of people working to improve the UK built environment.

If the industry accepts, no matter how grudgingly, it is in for the chop then the battle will already be lost. Between now and the election construction cannot ever be allowed to be viewed as an easy target for the axe.

That is why the entire industry must throw its unified weight behind the UK Contractors Group's effort to set the record straight. At long last the industry is armed with detailed research about what construction really does for the UK economy.

The succinct Construction in the Economy: the Benefits of Investment report spells out a compelling economic case in pounds and pence why construction must be spared.

It amounts to a battle cry for commonsense. Its ammunition, a detailed list of benefits that would challenge any rationally-minded politician into thinking again about what construction contributes.

From now on the industry mantra is every £1 spent on construction directly delivers a £3 rise in GDP.

The fight back starts here.

Contractors already struggling with work falling off a cliff-edge will also be dismayed to hear that output will fall by a record 15% this year, followed by a further slide in 2010.

Rather than loose faith, now is the time to focus on the fact that this is not the first time construction has faced a long haul out of the mire - remember the early nineties.

The last 12 months have eroded much of what Latham and Egan championed, eaten away by the cut-throat bidding epidemic presently gripping the UK construction industry.

The full extent of the damage will not be known until next week when Constructing Excellence evaluates where we stand today on the process of industry reform.

It is tempting to tell it how it is and claim all is lost: best practice procurement shaken to its foundations, skills gone for good and the respect for people initiative just a distinct memory.

This is too defeatist.

This time round it is even more important for the industry to face up to the unpleasant truth of stagnant growth and use it as an opportunity to place construction on a firmer footing.

The contracting industry will emerge from this stronger, if somewhat smaller. And those fit enough to survive the monumental slide must take a deep breath and start talking about how to create a more resilient industry for the future.

The woolly explanations behind such wildly varied fines naturally leaves contractors feeling unfairly treated. What is very worrying from a jobs perspective is that while most big contractors can pay up without to much damage to their balance sheets, many smaller contractors feel they have little left to lose.

Whatever the final count on who finally decides to risk stirring up further OFT wrath with an appeal, it is a fair bet that the whole sorry matter is going to drag on for sometime yet.
Since that is the case, at this juncture it is worth dwelling on how much cover pricing really cost tax payers and clients.

In most of the cases, the OFT's own inquiries suggest just two bidders pitched cover prices, the rest - usually four firms - put in market rates. While it is hard to say for certain that the winning bid was unaffected, it seems a fair bet that in most cases the client achieved a similar value for money. Of course there were a few cases where big kickbacks were handed out, but these were in the minority.

One other issue that needs to be properly aired is why cover pricing toot root in the first place.

Between 2001-2006, firms were trying to cope with a glut of tenders with precious few estimators to call on. More importantly the quality of public sector tender information was quite poor in that period. Estimators complain that around that time the detail in tender documents was at best sketchy and often insufficient time was allowed to build reliable bids.

Against this background, are contractors entirely to blame? Weren't many simply trying to reduce their risks while not offending the sensibilities of clients operating important frameworks?

Of course a lot has changed since then and now the real threat to outturn costs comes from another direction, suboptimal bidding. Most construction firms say there is an epidemic of  suicidal bids sweeping through the industry. This will ultimately be damaging for clients and the supply chain.

In the spirit of level playing fields and value for money, perhaps the OFT should ask a few public sector clients how far they feel it is fair to squeeze contractors' prices. Encouraging and then taking suicidal prices, may not be bid-rigging, but it can have even more dire consequences for the public purse.

The evidence that good practice is being eroded by suicidal bidding is at best anecdotal, but several contractors have approached Contract Journal in recent weeks bitterly complaining that they are losing out to firms that have sprung up from nowhere.

They all complain they have spent a small fortune in recent years quite properly improving safety procedures and jumping through various financial hoops to comply with main contractors' prequalification requirements. Now they are losing out to bids that are unsustainable.

One civils firm said his contract win rates have slid from 25% to just 5% of tendered work. In his words "something is going wrong".

The perennial problem for construction is it is often difficult to prove corners are being cut until it is too late and somebody is seriously injured or killed.

That is why the latest safety initiative to stamp out poor site supervision, agreed by all 29 major contractors in the UK Contractors Group, must be welcomed by the whole industry. 

In the current economic climate this is a bold attempt to answer real concerns about the quality of site supervision in the industry, particularly surrounding the enforcement of good health and safety practice.

From the start January 2009 any supervisors who are not properly qualified will be banned from overseeing workers. From that day on all supervisors will need to submit an accepted training certificate or card proving they have the appropriate safety and supervisory skills.

The rule applies to all site supervisory staff, but is targeted at those working for subcontractors. Of course many foremen working for subbies will sigh in despair at the thought of having to deal with yet more red tape.

But this time round it looks like a small price to pay to avoid a dangerous slide into second-rate supervision that undermines hard-won safety standards.

Supervisors carry a lot of responsibility as the frontline enforcers of site safety and as such should be properly qualified.

The excitement and optimism about Crossrail is palpable even among hard-bitten civil engineering contractors. This is an important milestone because it is the clearest signal yet of the mood of confidence growing among the project's backers.

Preliminary works are underway, design work is well advanced and all the key engineering posts are filled.

For its part the contracting fraternity is primed and organised into consortia ready to get their teeth into bidding for the mammoth tunnelling contracts that make up the core of the biggest London transport project since the Underground.

Everybody needs Crossrail to progress. Not only because it is a boost to construction at a time when the going is tough, but also because this vital infrastructure project is capable of delivering wider economic benefits, estimated to be worth £38bn.

A project of this size will take months and thousands of man hours to bid, a cost that each consortium is happy to bear in a fair chase to win such a big prize.

But what happens if the project is significantly delayed or worse mothballed.

Cancelling the project at this stage would clearly be lunacy, but that doesn't mean that the prospect of a new Government reneging on funding should be ignored. On a project of this scale all possibilities have to be considered at the outset.

In such an event, it is clear there should be some provision put in place to refund contractors that will have spent millions of pounds bidding the project.

This does not undermine the process but serves to sweep away any nagging doubts in the bidding process.

A near two-thirds jump in housing starts in the second quarter compared to the preceding period offered a welcome surprise start to the main holiday season.

To throw in a bit more bank holiday cheer a growing band of house builders are revealling they are planning to get their chequebooks out to snap up some cheap land in coming weeks. Certainly Bovis Homes and Persimmon are more upbeat than they have been for nearly two years.

Even Irish developer Ballymore, which made its name developing ambitious apartment schemes, is talking to potential backers about restarting stalled projects like its Piccadilly project in Manchester.

So anyone tired of staring into the abyss of expected public spending cuts would do well to take another glance at the house building industry.

Any construction contractor with a bit of cash has a golden opportunity to pick up some good building plots with land prices 70% below the peak. Even struggling trade contractors would do well to revist the bigger name house builders to re-explore the chances off winning some much-needed work.

Of course, it is all too easy to overstate the prospects for housing. After all the entire house building industry is united in warning that the recovery is on a knife-edge with growing unemployment threating to kill off renewed optimism.

Many of the city analysts who made a name talking the market down last year, still argue a 15% drop in house prices is in the offing.

The jury is still out. But Contract Journal for what it's worth believes the market has bottomed out and house building activity is on the rise.

Of course, it all depends on where you are. In much of the country there has been a shift from appartments to houses, which will favour trade contractors over tier 1 firms.

London and the south east will be the first to experience a proper recovery, with the north of Britain struggling on for some time ahead.

But if its growth and a bit of certainty you are looking for, house building is the place to find it. Housing was the first industry to tumble off the cliff. It is cautiously clambering up from the bottom and looks set to be the first out of recession.

Maybe the time has come to dust down that now unfashionable model of running a contracting business alongside a house builder.

There is much sentiment about construction's central role in delivering a low carbon environment, but not much to be had in new investment.

Key initiative: The Government is investing up to £6 million to construct 60 or more low carbon affordable homes built with innovative, highly insulating renewable materials.

Much more for those into energy infrastructure.

In one sense it formally airs familiar ideas that have been circulating for while.

Rightly, it recognises five-years are too long a time for families to weight for a verdict on why the father or son was killed.

There are also sensible ideas about putting some of the onus on workers to accept they have a duty to themselves to act responsibly.

Most contentious of them all is the proposal to extend gangmasters registration legislation to construction. This misses a fundamental point. The industry is not treating it casual workers like Morecambe Bay cockle-pickers. Yes conditions were once a disgrace in some quarters, but the industry has come a long way since the bad old days.

Extra health and safety red tape is not what is needed. The emphasis must turn to enforcement. Time and effort needs to be directed at the rogue firms, on policing the existing regulations and publishing the duties that workers, managers and directors alike must fulfil.

The report One Death is Too Many is a jamboree bag of promising ideas, but fails to deliver the big idea that the industry could rally around as it works to improve both the safety and health of the workforce.

In this case, subcontractors working for failed Pierse Contracting and Pierse Contracting Southern are reeling because they were not paid for months and now stand no chance of recovering what they are owed.

No company names are mentioned to protect those involved on a particular job. But this case illustrates the misery heaped on subcontractors from bad debt.

This problem is dangerously commonplace and shows no signs of going away.

When bad debt strikes firms can topple like dominoes, undermining the foundations of front-line production in construction.

Action needs to be taken now to protect those further down the supply chain. After all main contractors are protected from company failure and bad delivery by a raft of measures ranging from performance bonds and collateral warranties to parent company guarantees and retentions.

So why is the rest of the supply chain less deserving of fail-safe mechanisms? In this current economic climate even the biggest companies fail with little warning. The rest of Europe has evolved systems to protect payment in construction, why is the UK alone as a country that leaves its subcontractors exposed?

This is not a lost cause. Help could be given quickly as fortuitously the proposed Construction Bill is passing through its last reading stages at the moment

Plans to table some useful subcontractor amendments by trade bodies, like the Specialist Engineering Contractors Group must be supported, not rejected.

Everybody has the right to some protection, not just those at the top of the supply chain.  Let's see some unity on this issue.

Just nine months ago construction was going to kick-start the economy through the worst of the economic crisis, helped by the Government's economic stimulus package.

Since then we have seen a jolting 9% fall in construction output in the first three months of the year, in fact the worst quarter on quarter drop since records began.

Currently, hundreds of valuable college projects are destined for the scrapheap because nobody knows how is much money the Learning and Skills Council has to spend.

Meanwhile house building continues to float aimlessly in the doldrums, with even social housing providers struggling to find finance for projects.

And now to add insult to injury, construction is bestowed with yet another new minister, the fourth in two years. The situation is simply a mess.

If there was ever a time to appoint a Chief Construction Officer to sort this out, it is now. But even that post looks to have been kicked into the long grass, although Whitehall says it is still considering feedback from the industry.

In the eyes of many in the construction industry, Labour looks like a lame duck Government.
It is high time the focus switched from mending the expenses system, a significant but small issue, back to fixing infrastructure, which remain a significant and big issue for the country.

There is much talk about cutting spending but very little reference made to high price of unemployment. This is an area where construction can help. After all, every construction worker kept off the dole delivers £30,000 in reduced benefits and tax gains. Now that is something that somebody in Government should be focusing on.

Should contractors support a floundering government as it lurches from crisis to crisis, or call for an early general election in the hope that it will bring relief and a better long term economic outlook?

The only answer is to play for more time. As tempting as it is to hope for swift change, the next general election is certain to usher in an era of painful spending cuts. This age of austerity will present serious problems for contractors and suppliers.

Whether the spending freeze sees big projects suddenly axed or entire programmes brought under lengthy review is academic, the outcome is the same - projects that gave the industry confidence to battle through the credit crunch will grind to a halt.

Some contractors even fear that the flow of work from big education and local authority frameworks, which offer flattering order books, will be shut off in one sharp twist of the wrist by the next Chancellor.

There are already signs of the hard times to come. News that 74 contractors are currently chasing a £3 million school job in Kent should be a warning to contractors, big and small.

Contractors can be forgiven for being seduced into seeing public sector work as the only hope of keeping afloat. After all the last six months saw private work simply dry up. But relying on public sector orders now looks like sleeping walking over the cliff.

2010 is going to be extremely testing for everybody and many expect one of the major contractors to fall victim to the big spending freeze.

This unpalatable truth is time is running out to review the strengths and future direction of many contracting businesses.

Rail, energy and utility projects look like safe havens, if still very competitive markets, even housing offers some limited possibilities. But the real prize will go to those spending time with potential private sector clients.

There may only be a few intent on pushing ahead with capital spending at the moment. The food industry, which cruised through the credit crunch, is building and expanding capacity, even a few developers like Helical Bar are calling on investors to build up cash reserves for new projects. 

The good news is confidence is gradually returning. And with every month that passes, the better the odds are for contractors finding work to help fill the black hole created by spending cuts. So pray for an election in May.