Every New Year – without fail, people make firm decisions. Those decisions – in building terms usually mean Go! They rarely mean Whoa! So naturally we are swamped with clients wanting their projects to get out of the New Year blocks running. This New Year is suffering from a large pent-up demand for construction starts. Last year we were still in a lockdown of sorts and any delays caused by that and holdouts waiting for material prices to drop are all, quite rightly, very keen to start. We now have a severe shortage of trained construction staff right across the industry and this is not going to improve in the short term (or even the medium term) so the issues of last year’s material price inflation have now merely been replaced with labour cost inflation. I have always told clients that there is no optimum time to start a project – just look around, assess the market, budget for the hurdles…and get cracking!