According to the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, construction lost more jobs than any other industry and accounted for virtually half the 500,000 jobs lost across all industries in the last 12-months.
Government statisticians reckon in the last three months of this year alone more than 63,000 jobs were lost from the wider construction workforce, which now stands at 2,045,000.
At the peak of the construction boom in September 2008, when the US investment bank Lehmans collapsed, there were 2,364,000 employed in construction-related work.
Prospects are not going to improve as savage spending cuts hit public sector works contracts.
Despite the big fall in employment, the number of redundancies in the first three months of this year actually fell to 29,000, compared to the 34,000 made redundant in the last quarter of 2009.