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Insights

Short pieces written on the regulations, cost data and industry news that change what a scheme costs. We write them ourselves, and each one says what the change is worth in money.

WHAT WE WRITE ABOUT

We do not publish news for its own sake. Each piece exists because it changes a number in an estimate, and it says which number and by roughly how much.

  • Cost Watch. A short round-up of the numbers that moved, with what each one does to an estimate.

  • Regulation. Building Regulations, the Building Safety Act, planning obligations, and what they add per plot or per square metre.

  • Cost Data. BCIS and published indices set against what our own tenders are actually returning.

  • Comment. Our response to pieces in Building and the wider trade press, from the cost side.

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26 October 2026

• PINNED

Communal heating or triple glazing: which costs a developer less?

Points

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MORE FROM US

30 October 2026

Test

test blog
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25 September 2026

Three deadlines in one autumn, and each one turns on a different date

A scheme can be caught by one and escape the other two. Getting this wrong is not a compliance problem, it is a land value problem, because each of the three has a price.
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16 September 2026

The Building Safety Levy starts on 1 October. An appraisal that does not carry it is overstating land value

This is not a planning risk to keep an eye on. It is a statutory cost, fixed by the date of your Building Control application, which on a good many schemes is a decision that has to be taken within the next fortnight.
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8 September 2026

Second staircases become mandatory on 30 September. The cost is not the staircase

It is the net to gross. A second core takes saleable area out of every floor of the building, and on a scheme already consented that loss has nowhere to go.
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1 September 2026

What a 60-unit scheme now carries before a single brick is laid

Statutory and planning costs have been accumulating one at a time, each announced separately and each absorbed separately. Added together they are no longer a line in the appraisal.
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25 August 2026

Gateway 2 is twice as fast as it was, and still 22 weeks. That is a cost, not a delay

The regulator has halved its median decision time on new build applications. It is a genuine improvement, and it still puts 5 months between a finished design and a spade in the ground.
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18 August 2026

Cost Watch No.1

Structural steel up 17.7% in a year • Biodiversity net gain exemptions took effect on 6 August • 343 construction insolvencies in July • Gateway 2 now runs at a 22 week median.
Read

28 July 2026

A fifth of our bricks are now imported, and that is a specification risk before it is a cost one

Domestic brick production has fallen and imports have filled the gap. For a developer that shows up as specification risk long before it shows up as rate.
Read

16 September 2026

What moved in the last fortnight and what it does to a number.

Collapsible text is great for longer section titles and descriptions. It gives people access to all the info they need, while keeping your layout clean. Link your text to anything, or set your text box to expand on click. Write your text here...

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Who writes these

Mark Stevens FRICS, Chartered Quantity Surveyor, with over thirty-three years pricing schemes from £1.1m to £142m. No ghostwriters and no press releases. If a figure appears, it came from a real estimate or a named published source.

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Comment and analysis on construction regulation and cost data, from a Chartered Quantity Surveyor. Feasibility estimating and cost planning, RIBA Stages 0 to 4.

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