The first job losses in this downturn were not in banking but in construction. The longest building boom since the war has ended with a bang. Skies are going unscraped, buy-to-let apartments unbought, unlet and now unbuilt.

“My mistake in the last recession was to lay off five people when I should have laid off 50,” says Maxwell Hutchinson, a former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. “You need to take the tough decisions and you need to be honest with your clients if you’re facing difficulties.”