Meritocracy Italy: “compensation measures are urgently needed to cope with rising raw materials”

Meritocrazia Italia believes that the introduction of compensation measures cannot be postponed to cope with the sharp rise in the cost of materials and raw materials. This was stated by the president of Meritocrazia Italia, Walter Mauriello. “The emergency crisis – he observes – does not let go of the real economy. From autumn 2020 the demand for products and services gradually restarted, but the production industries, forced to keep their plants down in the previous spring, did not made to be ready to restart. Thus, at the time of the recovery of confidence and the recovery of orders, inventories were found to be insufficient, causing an exorbitant increase (in some of 130%) in the prices of raw materials and semi-finished products “. The problem, notes Mauriello, “certainly concerns the economic operators of public contracts, who had submitted their offer in the tender procedures before the increase. But even the operators of the private sector, strongly interested in a rebalancing of prices, do not escape the worries. of raw materials in consideration of the recovery measures introduced by the Recovery Fund for the purpose of relaunching private construction “, underlines. Useful but certainly not decisive, notes the president of Meritocrazia Italia,” is the Sostegni bis decree, with which, in derogation from the ordinary discipline, the possibility for the contractor to submit an application for compensation to the contracting authority, under penalty of forfeiture within fifteen days from the date of publication in the Official Journal of the decree of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility of detection de the percentage variations, up or down, in the prices of the most significant building materials. Net of the consequent discriminatory effect on public contractors in the event of late submission of the compensation request, the problem remains for the expensive materials in private works, which risks jeopardizing the restart of the relative areas of intervention (i.e. Superbonus 110%, planned interventions in the field of school buildings, production activities based in the seismic crater, etc.) “. For this reason, he stresses,” Meritocrazia Italia believes it is highly unpostponable to introduce suitable compensation measures, in the face of the strong increase in the cost of materials and raw materials, also in support of the private construction sector, similarly to what is foreseen for the public works sector; introduce an extension for the year 2021 to the awarding of tenders and allow ‘exceptionally’ the use of cost savings, with reference to the school construction sector; ensure, without this entailing greater burdens for the State, the exemption from the payment of VAT for the productive activities involved in the reconstruction in the area of ​​the seismic crater; make the deadline set by the Sostegni bis decree ordinatory, so that all public contractors can file an application for price compensation “. The corrective measures required, he concludes,” are essential if you do not want to seriously delay the economic recovery of the country in the sector of contracts and completely cut off the wings of private construction, the leading sector of the Italian economy “.