It’s time to show our resilience

Oh how I laughed a year or so ago when a Somerset-based friend of mine said her civil servant husband was now "head of resilience" for the Bristol area. It conjured up images of the spoof television programme Twenty Twelve, the mockumentary that followed the progress of the fictional Olympic Deliverance Commission in the run-up to the London Olympics.

Of course I regret laughing now and we could certainly all do with a head of deliverance, not just for Somerset but for the other areas of the country that are waist deep in water.

I certainly wasn't laughing when I saw the piece Countryfile did on the floods when they interviewed a bespoke timber floor manufacturer in a factory that had become part of the river system. Surveying the scene from a mezzanine level - the only current access to the building - the owner balefully predicted a loss of around £1m-worth of stock and machinery. The loss of business on top of that is probably incalculable.

They do say that every cloud has a silver lining - excuse the tasteless pun - and doubtless there will be a host of RMI projects that will benefit timber and builders merchants down the line but how that will balance the misery to homeowners and the loss of business currently being experienced is anyone's guess.

And, of course, it's also anyone's guess what the time-frame will be. It's interesting to see the top insurance group chief executives following in the footsteps of the energy providers and water companies in being summoned to Downing Street - a bit like being sent to the headmaster's office for not doing your homework - but even when they do pay out for all the replacement flooring, skirting and so on, it's likely to be months before any work can start.

Having said that, some repair work is going ahead and there was a noticeable lack of fence panels and related ironmongery at my local DIY shed when I went to pick up some replacement trellis at the weekend. Judging by the armfuls of metal fence post spikes one chap was carrying, some homeowners can't wait any longer and there is some serious work ahead in the garden.

There is certainly huge demand for fencing material at the moment, with no let-up on production from the primary processors who aren't having much opportunity to build stocks. January demand has almost been on a par with good pre-Easter business, with one sawmiller saying this week that he was completely sold out on featheredge and could put another three fencing lines in and still be flat out.

It's one bright spot among many for the timber sector as the economy slowly grinds its way back to health. For many manufacturers, business is now more about managing expectations than wondering where the next order is coming from. Last month one manufacturer said to me that some of his employees have never experienced healthy levels of business and it's going to take them a while to learn how to work faster. It's a whole new set of challenges - but a better set than the sector was facing this time last year.

According to the latest ONS statistics, construction, that great barometer of economic wellbeing, saw three successive quarters of growth last year, the first time this has happened since 2010. Housebuilding has been at the heart of this resurgence, with private sector housebuilding in Q4 up 19% on the same time in 2012 and public sector housebuilding up 22.6%.

One can but hope that developers will pay heed to TRADA and its renewed calls to raise the ground floor of homes in risk areas using post and beam construction to create "floatable" houses .

Now that's what I call resilience.