Cost of home improvement to soar as Travis Perkins hikes prices

Homeowners face bigger bills for renovations after Britain’s largest builders’ merchant warned that prices for roofing, bricks and drainage materials will rise by much more than the rate of inflation next month.

Travis Perkins, which supplies almost 300,000 builders and tradespeople across Britain, told its customers in the construction trade this week to expect price rises in January.

In an email seen by The Sunday Times, it said the cost of blocks would rise by up to 9 per cent, with bricks, landscaping and drainage products rising up to 8 per cent and roofing, plasterboard and cladding rising up to 7 per cent. Overall inflation slowed to 3.6 per cent in October.

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Damian Walters, chief executive of the British Institute of Fitted Interiors Specialists (BIFIS), said: “Every single one of those [materials] will impact our part of the industry without a shadow of a doubt. Any sort of price increase has an effect on the end user … those costs would need to be pushed on to the consumer.”

Manufacturers, merchants and builders were hit with higher labour costs in the wake of the chancellor’s budget in October 2024.

Professor Noble Francis, the economics director at the Construction Products Association (CPA), said these costs were being passed on to customers. “Wage cost pressure is having a significant impact all the way through the supply chain, especially for merchants and distributors, because they tend to be more labour intensive,” he said.

He added: “For some of the materials, they’re energy intensive and high energy costs again add to the pressure. If you’re making bricks, blocks, steel, all the heavy materials, energy can be up to one third of your total costs.”

However, demand for home improvements has been subdued. Planning permissions granted for home renovations plunged to a ten-year low in March.

Francis said: “We saw a big spike in home improvement during the pandemic ‘race for space’, and since then, we saw a sharp drop off, which was partly coming off a big spike and partly cost-of-living issues coming through.

“A lot of households do have the finance available, but they just don’t feel confident enough to spend because of all the uncertainty over the UK economy and uncertainty before the budget about where the tax rises were going to be.”

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Lucian Cook, head of residential research at Savills, added: “Despite the fact that we have seen a much more stable mortgage market in the recent past, we are in a higher interest rate environment.

“People’s desire to take on more debt to fund [renovations] through increased mortgages is affected.”

Interiors companies have collapsed in recent years, such as Fired Earth, the luxury tilemaker, which called in the administrators in October.

“The market is getting tougher, so to achieve growth we’re having to work harder and harder and harder,” said Jamie Everett, co-founder of Naked Kitchens.

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“We grew 22 per cent this year, which is great, but it’s a long way below what we wanted considering we grew nearly 60 per cent the year before. But other companies are just getting killed. It’s a game of winners and losers if you’re not pricing correctly.”

Travis Perkins was approached for comment. The FTSE 250 firm has been battling falling sales at its merchanting business, which fell 2.1 per cent over the year to the end of September. Its shares have declined 15 per cent this year.