Mr. Tom Parlon:

It is the case that there are going to be increased costs. Different people have attempted to put a figure on that. I regularly talk to my colleagues across Europe and their view, and that represents the entire industry across Europe, is that the extra costs will be between 5% and 10%. I spoke this morning to a very substantial house builder in Ireland and he reckons that the cost per house that he is turning out at the moment will be increased by between €10,000 and 15,000. He expects that the cost in respect of apartments, which are obviously more intense and where it is more difficult to practice physical distancing, could be as much as €20,000 extra. He tells me that the programme for building a house currently is about 15 weeks and he estimates that with new physical distancing and so on that will go to 25 weeks. There are some more intense sites that could be substantially more than that.

Currently, the Office of Government Procurement is examining that. It issued a guidance note last week. We in the CIF were disappointed to find that it only applied to the extra expenses that we have to incur in terms of coping with the new national protocol but we are expecting a new note, maybe this week, that is going to look at how the extra costs are going to be dealt with in the public sector. However, in the private sector, one has to negotiate one's own terms.