LONDON, (Reuters) - British construction output suffered an unexpected sharp fall in October, even as growth in preceding months was revised up and handed a slight boost to overall economic growth in the third quarter.
Construction output fell 2.2 percent in October after rising by the same amount in September, the Office for National Statistics said on Friday.
That slowed year-on-year growth to 0.7 percent, its weakest since May 2013, when Britain's housing market was starting a strong recovery.
Economists in a Reuters poll had expected 0.7 percent growth in monthly terms and 1.3 percent on the year.
On a three-monthly basis -- which smooths out some of the volatility in the data -- construction output growth slipped 0.3 percent.
However, there were sharp upward revisions to previous estimates of the construction industry's growth.
Output in the sector in the third quarter rose 1.6 percent, compared with a previous estimate of 0.8 percent, which would boost British economic growth in the third quarter by 0.1 percentage points to 0.8 percent if all other components of GDP remained unchanged, the ONS said.
Construction makes up about 6 percent of Britain's economy and the industry has grown robustly until recently, recovering from some of the hefty loss in output suffered after the financial crisis.
Still, the sector's output is still around 7 percent below its pre-downturn level.
Britain needs to increase the pace of housebuilding significantly to meet strong demand that has pushed up prices.
But total housebuilding in October fell 0.8 percent from September. The ONS said it was not unusual to see a weak start to a calendar quarter in construction, although the figures were lower than it expected.
House prices grew at their slowest rate in a year and a half during the past three months, a property industry body said on Thursday, but a planned cut to property taxes was likely to temper the lull in sales.
The ONS said it saw reductions in output across the sector, with only public new work excluding infrastructure showing a slight increase.
Friday's figures chime with a Markit purchasing managers' survey last week which showed construction activity expanded at the slowest pace in more than a year in November.
Data on Tuesday showed manufacturing slumped unexpectedly in October after a strong September, but economists said the country's economic recovery still looked set to slow only slightly at the end of 2014.
On Thursday, Britain's official statistics watchdog said the country's monthly construction output data had fallen below required standards due to the government's failure to improve the quality of figures used to create this data.
(Reporting by Andy Bruce and William Schomberg)