The price of concrete has gone up a lot due to the cost of energy. My parents built a house in 1962. All the other houses on the road were 1905 stock and had gables. They wanted to build in the same style, but council said no. Also they insisted the house be built further back than the rest because they might widen the road. The road is the same width today as it was back then of course. In 1962 the materials were a lot cheaper if we index them to say how much a bricky would be paid in a day or say a standard job like a secretary. Regs have been added each year when really there was never a problem with say a house built in the 1930s with min regs back then.
Well, I agree on the face of it you have a compelling argument
If indeed prices have rocketed then this would be a powerful argument by a builder's merchant
It is however a lie
In 1999 I was sitting in the offices of Yorkshire Electricity Group writing the test scripts for the stock market gambling simulation and trading platform Maggie Thatcher's New Electricity Trading Arrangements has mutated energy supply into
YEG realised there was huge profit to be made from speculating that customers would use far more than they really would, contracting to have that huge excess supplied, and sell it back to the national grid unused at a huge profit to bale out idiots who gambled the other way and lost, or take from the grid at a pittance the oversupply from another's miscalculation
They did a deal with blue circle cement to run stone crushers for nothing and fire drying kilns at a peppercorn price if the cement company allowed YEG to control when these processes were done, to allow them to dump the cheap energy and deny them energy when selling it to a foolish gambler who lost was more profitable
Seeing their profits rocket from this divergence into cement making, the other energy suppliers did the same with other makers
The cost to MAKE a ton of cement or gypsum plaster, far from rocketing, TANKED in 1999 and STAYED tanked
The cement making firms may have chosen to profiteer of course
