ROUND TABLE REGIONAL VIEWPOINTS


BMJ sat down with the Regional Chairs of NBG to discuss market uncertainty, regional pressures and how this impacts on NBG and its Partners and Suppliers


BMJ: There’s a great deal happening across the industry: uncertainty, economic pressures, squeezed margins, staffing issues and the ongoing question of what “normal” trading even means anymore. Nigel Drew: The biggest challenge is that the market simply won’t stabilise. It’s a real rollercoaster. One minute it’s up, the next minute it’s down, and just when you think there’s a trend forming, it jolts the other way again. You can’t rely on anything. Part of the problem is there are people influencing the economy and making decisions who, frankly, are not businesspeople. They don’t understand the long- term impacts of stop-start economic signals. Somehow, at some point, the economy has to get back on track, but it’s going to take a while. So, our challenge is surviving in this in-between stage, and trying to make sensible decisions when the ground is constantly shifting beneath us.


Tim Scott: It’s not just a regional issue. This isn’t confined to one pocket of the UK, it’s national. Every region, every Partner, and every Supplier is feeling the same pressures. There’s a wider fragility across the whole country that is affecting everyone’s confidence. It isn’t that the work has disappeared entirely; it’s that nobody knows what’s coming next. Rachel Fryers: On top of that, we’re dealing with the highest level of competition the market has probably ever seen. More merchants than ever before, more choice, more branches, and all of it fighting for what feels like a smaller customer base than we had 10 years ago. You’ve got long-established merchants battling it out with national chains, and then, confusingly, new independent start-ups popping up. The pie isn’t getting any bigger, but the number of people trying to grab a slice definitely is. TS: Take our region: Chelmsford is a great example. It must have the highest density of merchants per square mile in the country. There’s deep saturation, and it’s mainly the big players like Jewson, Travis and so on. That kind of environment completely reshapes how you operate. Then you’ve got the occasional new independent popping up as well. Even if the market were booming and I wanted to open a yard tomorrow, I’d struggle just to find a location. That’s before we even get to planning. ND: Planning is a constant frustration. The


22 PARTICIPANTS:


Tim Scott Professional Traders Ltd


Rachel Fryers Merrit & Fryers Ltd


Nigel Drew Civil Solutions Ltd


Matthew Byiers Newline Building Products Ltd


system is painfully slow. Eighteen months just to get a decision, and not even for something major. Getting permission for a simple extension can drag on for over a year. It creates stagnation. You can’t modernise, you can’t expand, you can’t adapt your site footprint. The planning system is supposed to support development, but at the moment it feels like it hinders it. Matthew Byiers: While all of this is happening, we’re dealing with price deflation that’s hitting hard. A lot of products have no margin left at all, you can sell them, but you’re not making any money on them. Then you get the national chains that react in different ways as their goals shift: one minute they’re all about turnover, turnover, turnover, and then the next it’s all about small-builder loyalty and squeezing profits out of everything. Their actions, to a certain extent, are determined by their shareholder expectations. Independents might not have that same pressure, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier for us. TS: The big chains have this model in which they accept that the first two years of a new depot can be tough ones in terms of actually making that branch profitable. Where it gets even tricker for them is if their existing depots aren’t making money either. That has a knock-on effect for all of us because it distorts the market. Meanwhile, our own costs have all gone up: wages, utilities, insurance. Driver wages have risen by 10% in many cases just to keep people working for us. None of that is coming back to us in increased sale prices. RF: And the timing of the Budget in 2025 – pushing it back to late November – was disastrous. It was like 2024 all over again. Nobody wanted to take decisions until they heard what was coming, and that sort of indecision creates a


Mark Smith NBG


bottleneck in our busiest period. October would normally have been a strong month, a chance to pick up winter prep sales, but everything froze because nobody knew what the Budget would hold. By the time it arrived, it was practically Christmas. It kills momentum. ND: And the media doesn’t help. You get weeks of speculation and rumour, like they’re drip-feeding test ideas to see how people react. None of it creates confidence. It’s all delay and uncertainty. RF: It’s maddening because if it turns out to be a negative Budget –- which it was in many ways – and then we get a bad run of weather, that’s two hits at once. That’s exactly what happened last year. We’re literally repeating the same pattern. It’s like Groundhog Day. MB: In Scotland, January 2024 was the worst in 18 years. We had snow and ice for the entire month. Nobody came back to work. We basically didn’t reopen properly until February. Extended holidays are more common now – what used to be a week off is now three, four, five weeks. RF: Building site crews are smaller. Builders claim they’re busy, but they’ve gone from five or six-person teams down to two or three. They’re still working full days, but the output volume is nowhere near what it used to be. So they feel flat out but the numbers tell a different story. ND: That’s a pattern across the country. Reduced labour means reduced throughput. It changes what “busy” actually means. RF: And I don’t think any of us have worked harder for so little in terms of growth. But maybe this is just what normal looks like. Covid warped our expectations. Everyone was running around like lunatics, so the drop afterwards felt like a crash, even if it was really just a return to realistic trading.


January 2026


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