Building Work Delays Continue As Supplies Still Affected By Coronavirus

Commercial and private building projects are facing continued delays as supply chains struggle to catch up with demand due to the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic. Poor availability of essential items such as plaster is meaning that many smaller contractors and tradespeople are unable to finish projects and receive their final payments, leaving many with no option but to buy stocks privately at greatly inflated prices.

In the UK, stocks of the popular British Gypsum ‘Multi-Finish’ plaster, which is used for a variety of plastering tasks, has been selling out within a matter of hours each time is it replaced. Large and small builders merchants alike have been unable to supply sufficient stock to meet the demand, as the trade sees a similar ‘panic buying’ to what was experienced in supermarkets at the start of the pandemic. As is it such an essential part of any building projects, growing numbers are wanting to stock up to ensure that they can continue working and billing for completed work.

Given the value of this particular commodity, there are stocks of multi-finish plaster available on sites like Facebook, Ebay and Gumtree for significantly higher than the retail price. In one report by the Manchester Evening News, it was revealed that people were selling them for up to seven times the retail price, at around £45 ($60) per bag.

Most of these are likely to have been bought by those able to get to stores and snap up stocks before they sold out. To try and ensure fair dispersal of these limited supply items, builders merchants like B&Q, Wickes and Travis Perkins have capped sales at 10 bags per customer, but even with this measure in place they have been selling out within a matter of hours. Wickes has been using its online stock checker facility to help keep customers informed and it has been clear from watching these levels fall just how quickly stocks are being purchased. On customer I spoke to personally made the decision to embark on a 2 hour trip to purchase some plaster from the closest store to them which had some available. All of their local stores were completely out, but this one was displaying around 230 bags via the online stock checker, so they decided to take the plunge and make the journey. The customer described the panic as the online numbers dwindled rapidly as their journey progressed. When they were just 10 minutes away from the store, stock levels were showing at just 31 bags left, but thankfully, they were one of the last customers to buy their bags before the store was once again out of stock.

Angry members of the public have accused certain people of profiteering and leading others into financial difficulty by forcing them to pay extortionate prices for materials in order to carry on with their day jobs and feed their families. Others have justified it as simply the usual case of ‘supply and demand economics’, where if something is in scare supply, its unit price increases. The fact that retailers themselves have not put their prices up does make this latter argument a little harder to swallow though.

The apparent gap in the supply chain for plaster occurred because the factories producing the plaster shut down during the early stages of the pandemic. With production halted and transportation of existing stocks delayed, all existing supplies were exhausted leaving retailers reliant on new deliveries to service their customers. This has led to some referring to the plaster as ‘gold dust’.

British Gypsum is a major plaster supplier to the UK construction industry and their closure early on in the pandemic has been cited as a major factor in the current supply chain issues. One source in an interview for Construction News indicated that the sheer mass of supplies needed to build the Nightingale hospitals had led to an exhaustion of materials such as plasterboard. Of course, there are alternative suppliers of plaster, but many have cited that these are just not a good, meaning that most builders refuse to work with them. One builder speaking to the Manchester Evening News was reported as saying ‘We can get it from overseas, from Saudi Arabia, France and Ireland, but it’s just not as good as British Gypsum. It’s harder to work with and it doesn’t give as good a finish.’

Addressing the supply issues, Matt Pullen, Managing Director at British Gypsum released a statement saying, ‘We continue to operate at maximum capacity, to support the construction industry, provide protection for our customers’ and colleagues’ livelihoods, and play a vital part in the recovery of the UK economy. We are acutely aware that many of our individual plasterers are still having difficulty obtaining plaster from their usual Distributor, Merchant or DIY stockists. Given this continuing very high demand, plaster will remain on allocation to ensure we supply all our usual stockists fairly.”