Mr. James Benson:

We have just finished travelling around the country delivering a series of workshops for home builders in respect of Housing for All and some of the supports and issues contained therein. Without doubt, materials inflation is probably at the top of the list of concerns in the challenges being faced by builders. In May 2021, we completed a survey of all of our members, which looked at materials inflation for each cost component within a typical three-bedroom semi-detached house. At that time, it added somewhere in the region of €17,000 per unit. The impact of that was that the pre-tax profit margin dropped by almost half from 10% to 5%. If builders did not add on the cost, they would not meet the funding criteria, would not get the finance and could not commence the projects.

Where they did add it onto the price of a house, the affordability gap was made even worse and people could not access mortgages.