For a couple of weeks last month in the UK, Thistle MultiFinish building plaster, which usually retails at just over £5, was being sold on the black market for between £35 and £40.

1. Life after lockdown: How the coronavirus
pandemic is changing the way Britain builds
For a couple of weeks last month in the UK, Thistle MultiFinish building
plaster, which usually retails at just over £5, was being sold on the black
market for between £35 and £40.
“I started getting calls from people I haven’t heard from in years asking if I
had any,” Dan Hall, a builder from Surrey — a county south-west of London
— told Euronews. “There is none left, it’s all gone, it’s all been used up.”
The construction industry makes up around 10% of the British economy and
was one of the last sections of the UK economy to shut down, with pictures
of packed construction site canteens causing controversy days after the
lockdown was announced on March 27.

2. In the end, said Hall, who owns his own firm, HSL Building Services, but has
worked extensively on sites as well as private projects, it was the supply
chain that forced UK builders to stop working, rather than any advice from
the government.
Two months on, the problem remains. Even the building merchants that
have reopened rely on stocks from factories, many of which are closed.
Those stores that do have stock are often reluctant to deliver for fear that
their staff will get sick.
“I’m doing a job at the moment and it took me a full eight hour day to get
all the bits ready and supplied to the job. It would normally take me 15
minutes,” said Hall.
“It’s well and good that we can work if we’re safe, but if we can’t get stuff
we can’t work.”
An industry on hold
The impact of the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent lockdown is
being felt at both ends of the construction pipeline. From sole traders
working on home renovations to mega-projects employing thousands of
labourers, subcontractors and craftsmen.
Roni Savage, the founder of Jonas Associates and a civil engineer, says that
the industry has seen a major bottleneck due to the fact that developers are
unable to sell their current housing stock, with research suggesting that £82
billion worth of property transactions in the UK are on hold.
This week, the UK government announced that estate agents would be
exempted from the lockdown and could return to work. But while that is a

3. welcome development for the housing market, it will take time for the
buying and selling pipeline to start flowing again.
“You’ve had a period of seven or eight weeks when nobody has sold any of
their stock. So people have thought: We’ll build out what we have but we
will stop putting any sites in, we’ll stop buying new sites, we’ll stop going
through planning, and that is the issue now,” Savage said.
Another issue is how to enforce guidelines on construction sites so that
when work does begin again, workers are safe. One of the hardest
measures to enforce at both ends of the market is a two-metre distance
between workers, particularly on a busy construction site.
One method of dealing with the requirement has been staggering trades so
that fewer workers are on-site at the same time, says Hall. The different
trades: plumbers, plasterers, carpenters, have different hours and sites
open earlier and close later to enable them not to overlap.
But in other areas, construction is actually better equipped to deal with the
coronavirus compliance than other industries. Personal protective
equipment (PPE), for example, has been a legal requirement and a fact of
life on sites in the UK for some years.
“The attitude of wearing PPE is already part and parcel of the culture,” said
Hall. “We already wear helmets, gloves, goggles, masks, coverings on your
arms, safety boots, shin pads - so just to put a visor across your face isn’t
going to make an awful lot of difference.”
One of the biggest challenges, however, will be hygiene, because while
construction sites are far safer than they were 20 years ago, they are not an
awful lot cleaner.

4. “It’s dirty, smelly, sweaty work - you don’t bother washing yourself down
until you get home and have a shower. So there might be a cultural change,”
Hall said.
In those areas where it is impossible to enforce measures such as social
distancing, testing will be key to ensuring that the construction industry can
get moving again without either a natural end to the pandemic or a widely-
available vaccine, says Savage.
There are sections of the industry - such as scaffolding or operating heavy
machinery - where it is impossible not to have two workers in close
proximity. In these cases, only cheap, easy and widely-available tests for
COVID-19 will allow work to continue, she said.
“I think being able to come up with a system that would enable you to test
on the go would be a solution. It would give us confidence: You don’t have
it, so social distancing doesn’t really come into play,” she said.
Despite the uncertainty, Savage is confident that the industry will recover.
“We need to continue to stay positive and we need to continue to push the
government for incentives to keep the industry going and thriving. We’re
not going to crash and burn, we will recover, but how long that will take I
don’t know,” she said.