Also wood and many other building materials. Reasons that I've seen include:
1) Covid shutting down suppliers, manufacturers and container ports around the world.
2) Brexit - both the obvious, and also suppliers building up stocks for the 2 Brexit "deadlines" that came and went, in case of post-Brexit shortages, which led to price falls due to over-supply, so then Covid lockdowns gave a lot of people the chance to do a lot more DIY than usual at lower prices than usual, so the warehouses emptied and couldn't easily be refilled.
3) the Ever-Given stranding causing delays to other shipping.
4) HS2 getting first dibs on UK imports.
From what I've been told, there is not going to be a return to normal across the materials supply industry for a long time to come.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
