Building materials sector’s call for intervention: demand shock lens for project teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
UK construction materials suppliers report demand, not supply, as the critical constraint, with UK brick deliveries to November 2025 down 6.1% year-on-year while brick stocks have climbed 14.5% to 542.1 million units. The CLC Material Supply Chain Group, co-chaired by Builders Merchants Federation chief executive John Newcomb and Construction Products Association chief executive Peter Caplehorn, cites concrete volumes falling about 28% nationally over four years and 39% in London over two years, alongside a 1.3% drop in Q4 2025 construction output despite 0.3% UK GDP growth in November. Producers are mothballing sites, delaying capex and cutting jobs, with the group warning that restarting capacity could take up to six months and urging targeted government stimulus focused on housing and residential RMI to avoid long-term structural damage.
Technical Brief
- CLC’s Product Availability Group has been re-tasked and renamed the Material Supply Chain Group.
- Major manufacturers are mothballing sites, delaying capex and making redundancies to protect margins and cash.
- Where plants are running at low base load, ramp-up to meet renewed demand could take six months.
- Structural issues cited include delayed client investment decisions, planning capacity constraints and regulatory delays on new schemes.
- Supply-chain failures are increasing, with a “steady stream of administrations” attributed to weak demand and rising costs.
Our Take
With brick stocks at 542.1 million and a six‑month lag to ramp production, any rapid acceleration in the UK’s 1.5‑million homes programme risks short‑term supply bottlenecks unless government signals and procurement pipelines are clarified well ahead of 2026.
The UK focus in this piece contrasts with most of our 30 recent Materials stories, which are more skewed to project‑specific capex and execution; this suggests the Construction Leadership Council and Construction Products Association are now framing materials availability as a macro‑level constraint on national programmes such as the prison programme and Planning and Infrastructure Act schemes.
Three consecutive difficult years for the sector into 2025 in a low‑growth UK environment (0.3% monthly GDP uptick) mean many manufacturers are likely running lean on labour and kiln capacity, so any policy‑driven demand surge could initially be met by price rises rather than volume increases.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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