In the face of ever increasing fuel prices, Bradford-on-Avon stone restoration specialists Minerva have swapped their trucks for Fiat Puntos for getting teams to and from sites. And they are insisting that there is always more than one operative in each car.

Andrew Ziminski set up Minerva Stone Conservation with Andrew Sharland in 1992 after they had both attended the postgraduate Stone Conservation course at Weymouth College. He believes that because petrol is now cheaper than diesel and the Puntos are so economical to buy, put on the road and (at 63 miles per gallon) run, the change from diesel trucks to petrol cars will save money.

Instead of a truck being loaded up with people and materials for each site, the masons will now travel to work together in the cars and the materials will be delivered by the company's one, larger lorry to all the sites.

Andrew told NSS he had calculated that this improvement in logistics for the dozen or so people the company employs, would bring savings of as much as �1,000 a month.

Firms clearly need to make some adjustments for the price of fuel. As Michael Mellor of Montpellier Marble says (see page 32): "Sooner or later you have to say it's costing us 80-90p a mile and recoup that."

But, at the same time, competition is increasing. Andrew Ziminski says there still seems to be a lot of grant money bringing projects on stream, but that he is facing new competition from larger companies undercutting the price. "What I'm noticing is that we're getting just as many tenders through but we're having to price lower to be competitive."

Nevertheless, he says there are more projects to tender for than there were two years ago, when they were really struggling to find work in the West Country. "We had to think hard about everything and lay some people off. Then it picked up. There's a lot of conversion work going on."