Industry News HubThe government has committed £7m to examine the feasibility of staging the Olympic and Paralympic Games in the North of England during the 2040s, as part of a package of investment measures for the region announced in the Budget. The study will assess the potential…
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“Since the 1980s, Britain has lost over two million council homes. Tonight, more than 170,000 children will go to sleep in temporary accommodation,” the chancellor said.
“Labour is now building back,” he concluded.
Commenting on this policy, Matthew Jones, founder at Open ECX, said: “Increased investment in council and affordable housing represents a significant opportunity for the construction sector, but the bigger question is whether businesses are ready to meet the challenge.
“The sector has already taken a major hit from geopolitical disruption and inflationary pressures, so while we can of course get behind building more homes, the flip side is making sure construction firms are actually in a position to deliver them.”
Alex Read, CEO and Founder at Portman Finance Group, added: “Ambitious housebuilding targets will only translate into economic growth if construction firms have the capacity to deliver them.
“The sector has been hit by the double whammy of rising energy costs and a shortage of skilled workers, so if the government is serious about the programme, it needs to back these targets with investment in training schemes and the next generation of skilled tradespeople.”
Healey announced that a First Time Buyer ISA will replace the Lifetime ISA. He also pledged to address the LISA penalty, so if the home you want costs more than the limit, you’ll get back “at least what you put in”.
The chancellor also formally announced the Your First Home scheme, aimed at first-time buyers who are unable to rely on financial support to buy their first home.
From next Spring, the scheme will offer an equity loan, funded by £4.7bn of government-backed lending.
It is expected to be open to first-time buyers with a 2.5% deposit and to provide an equity loan worth 20% of the new build property’s value.
Clive Docwra, managing director of McBains, explained: “This first-time buyer measure could improve reservations, sales rates and cash flow for eligible new-build schemes. However, the effect will depend on eligibility, mortgage affordability, lender participation, price limits, regional coverage and launch date none of which is yet confirmed.”
The chancellor has announced that standing charges will be removed from household gas bills for tens of millions of people.
Instead, fixed costs will be paid on the unit rate, with the government estimating that 60% of households will save an average of £45 per year.
Standing charges are fixed daily fees applied separately to gas and electricity bills, which customers pay regardless of usage.
Twenty million households in council tax bands A-D will receive a £100 household energy payment this winter – paid directly into bank accounts for help with rising energy bills.
The government will also extend the VAT cut on electricity through the winter and spring to July.
Healey said: “This action will take £50 off the annual price cap.”
The chancellor has announced that the Government will remove Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) requirements from developments on brownfield sites.
BNG was set up to ensure developers avoid harm to important wildlife habitats, make up for unavoidable losses, and go further by giving back to nature, creating new habitats and wild spaces where people and wildlife can thrive.
Done well, it can protect wildlife and support nature recovery, yet today’s announcement further strips this once-promising policy of ambition.
Dom Higgins, head of health and education at The Wildlife Trusts, explained: “Exempting brownfield developments from Biodiversity Net Gain reduces access to nature in the communities that need it the most and will remove one of the biggest opportunities to bring trees, ponds, wildlife and parks back into towns and cities.
“Access to nature should not be a luxury. Designing housing and infrastructure with trees, parks, and space for nature has been shown to improve mental and physical health and boost people’s pride in their communities. These habitats also provide vital shade and cooling during heatwaves and help reduce flood risk.
“For a Budget that promised ‘breathing space’, this decision risks undermining the very thing that could give millions of people living in urban areas more space to breathe.”
The chancellor began addressing devolution by citing several smaller multi-million investments across England, including £10m for a new market hall in Stafford.
He also said devolved governments will receive the equivalent funding, including £2.5m for a science park in North Wales.
While London is the UK’s “economic powerhouse”, Healey says, growth would be “transformed” if other cities matched their counterparts in France and Germany.
“Local leaders shouldn’t have to come cap in hand to Whitehall to build a new tram or concert hall,” he stated.
Sarah Young, executive director for planning at LUC, commented: “We welcome the government’s commitment to giving local leaders greater powers and resources to drive growth, including new Good Growth funding and £150 million to strengthen the capacity and capabilities of strategic authorities.
“However, funding and devolved powers alone will not deliver the homes, infrastructure and regeneration that communities need. Success will depend on whether local authorities have the expertise and resources to turn investment into well-planned, sustainable development.”
She concluded: “Investment in planning capacity is therefore essential, including the planners, urban designers, landscape architects and environmental specialists who help shape development and ensure economic growth goes hand in hand with environmental protection.”
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Engineers are hearing a lot about AI, but an AI tool is only useful if it addresses genuine problems. Can it reduce repetitive work? Make important information easier to find? Help engineers navigate increasingly complex models and analysis results? And, crucially, can it do all this without taking engineering judgment out of the engineer’s hands?
That is the thinking behind Allplan Max, a new suite of AI-powered capabilities available with Allplan 2027. Rather than introducing AI for its own sake, Allplan Max brings practical AI capabilities into the tools and workflows engineers already use. The goal is simple: to remove some of the friction surrounding engineering work so professionals can spend more time applying their expertise where it adds most value.
Engineering projects generate enormous amounts of data. Therefore, the challenge is often finding the right information quickly enough to use it effectively.
AI BIM Analyst addresses this by enabling engineers to interrogate BIM data using natural language. Users can ask questions about the model, find and filter relevant information, and generate quantities and reports without having to manually search through large datasets or construct complex queries.
For structural engineers, AI Structural Analyser applies the same principle to analysis results. Available in SCIA Engineer 2027 and FRILO 2027, it can identify peaks, sign changes and critical sections that warrant attention, helping engineers locate significant results within complex calculations more quickly.
Importantly, it does not replace the engineer’s assessment of those results. Instead, it helps direct their attention to where their expertise is needed – allowing AI to process the complexity while the engineer makes the engineering decision.
Not every task on an engineer’s to-do list requires engineering judgment. Yet repetitive modelling, documentation and data management activities can consume a significant amount of time that could be spent on higher value work.
Several Allplan Max capabilities target these everyday tasks. AI Drafter, for example, automatically optimises reinforcement label placement to improve drawing readability, reducing the manual cleanup required during drawing production while leaving the underlying engineering content unchanged.
AI Formula Writer enables users to create complex formulas for automatically updating object attributes, filters, reports or labels without needing specialised Allplan coding knowledge.
Allplan Max can also accelerate the transition from existing information to usable BIM data. AI BIM Modeller transforms 2D drawings into BIM models in minutes, providing a basis for quantity take-off and cost estimation or a starting point for further BIM development.
Individually, these tasks may represent relatively small parts of the engineering process. Repeated across multiple drawings, models and projects, however, means automating them can give engineers valuable time back for the work that genuinely requires their expertise.
Even experienced engineers do not use every software function every day. When an unfamiliar task arises, finding the right command or working out the most efficient workflow can interrupt progress and take valuable time away from the project.
AI Coach provides on-demand guidance on Allplan workflows and functionality directly within the working environment. Rather than searching through documentation or relying on colleagues for help, users can access relevant guidance when they need it and continue working.
This can also support less experienced team members as they build their software knowledge quickly, helping firms make expertise more accessible and encouraging more consistent use of the tools available to them.
Every engineering firm has its own ways of working – from established processes and internal standards to specialist knowledge developed over years of project delivery. Turning that expertise into customised digital tools, however, has traditionally required programming skills or dedicated software development resources.
Feature Builder is designed to lower that barrier. Users can describe the process or capability they want to add to Allplan, and AI generates the Python code needed to create it. The code can then be reviewed by a technical team before installing and used within Allplan.
This creates opportunities to turn company-specific knowledge and ideas into reusable tools without starting every software development project from scratch. Instead of being limited to predefined functionality, engineering firms can increasingly adapt Allplan around their own methods and workflows. This way, valuable knowledge is retained, successful processes are standardised, and more of the work that makes their organisation unique can be automated.
Engineering workflows rarely exist within a single application. Project information moves between different tools and systems, so introducing AI effectively also means finding ways to connect it with the wider technology ecosystem.
Workflow Builder extends Allplan Max beyond individual Allplan tasks. Through an MCP server, it connects Allplan with compatible large language models and AI-agent platforms. This enables firms to create agentic automations that can retrieve project information, interact with other systems, and carry out workflows based on plain-language instructions.
Crucially, this gives organisations flexibility over how they adopt AI. Rather than being restricted to a predefined set of automated workflows, firms can build connections around their own processes and technology choices. As their approach to AI develops, Allplan Max can therefore become part of the wider digital workflow rather than another isolated tool.
The value of Allplan Max is not simply that it brings more AI into engineering software. It is what engineers can do with the time and insight those capabilities provide.
But greater automation does not mean handing engineering decisions over to AI. That distinction is built into individual capabilities. Instead, by making information easier to find, reducing repetitive production work, providing guidance on demand and opening new possibilities for customised automation, Allplan Max can help engineers spend less time working around their software and more time applying their expertise.
To learn more about Allplan Max, visit: Allplan Max.
*Please note, this is a commercial profile.
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On 21 October the prime minister asked the chancellor and the energy secretary to look at whether standing charges can be removed from gas bills. It was a line at Prime Minister’s Questions, not a policy. Nothing has been decided about how it would work, and that is exactly why the building services sector should engage now. The design will decide whether this helps or hinders the move away from gas boilers.
There are two very different ways to “remove” a standing charge.
The gas standing charge – a daily charge paid by consumers irrespective of how much gas is actually used – is 29.68p a day under the current price cap, about £108 a year. The proposal is that this cost moves to the gas unit rate.
Nesta, which proposed the idea, estimates the typical dual fuel household would save £27 a year, with poorer households gaining most as people that live in smaller homes will typically use less gas.
It also rewards efficiency. A fixed charge is the same, however well insulated (or not) a home is. Whereas energy bill (based on unit-rate charge) falls as consumption falls, so efficient homes pay less and improving efficiency become better value.
Households using more than about 12,400 kWh a year, typically larger or less efficient homes, would pay more. Consequently, people that live in larger homes would end up paying more. The impact of this is that the gas unit rate rises by about 9%, and the electricity-to-gas price ratio falls from 3.10 to 2.84 on forecasted January 2027 prices. It costs the Treasury nothing. This is a defensible, progressive reform that moves the price signal in the right direction.
The charge disappears and the cost is met elsewhere, most plausibly by taxpayers. Headlines promising households £108 a year imply this route.
Across roughly 24.7m dual fuel homes, that is about £2.7bn a year.
It would make gas cheaper overall, leave the price ratio untouched and spend public money keeping households connected to gas. That would work against electrification ambitions.
Today, the standing charge is the clearest financial reward for leaving the gas grid. A household that installs a heat pump and caps its meter saves £108 a year in fixed charges on top of the gas it no longer burns. Abolish the charge and that reward disappears. For a median home using 9,500 kWh, the higher unit rate offsets most of the loss: the total gas cost avoided by switching falls by about 5%.
The larger effect is at the margin of disconnection. Keeping a connection for a gas hob would cost almost nothing, so fewer heat pump households may bother to cap.
Ofgem itself regards the ability to disconnect and electrify as integral to consumers’ interests and to net zero. Yet the process is already costly: Energy UK has cited a £1,950 disconnection fee, which could grow to £2,300 by 2030.
Every low-use connection kept alive keeps network assets in service. With fixed costs now recovered per kWh over a shrinking volume, unit rates rise for those left on gas, often the households least able to move.
Even after rebalancing, electricity at 26.32p/kWh still costs about three times gas at roughly 8.7p. What matters for heat pumps is the ratio relative to efficiency. Assuming a boiler at 85% seasonal efficiency, heat from gas would cost about 10.2p/kWh.
A heat pump at a seasonal coefficient of performance (SCOP) of 3.0 delivers heat at about 8.8p/kWh; at SCOP 2.5, about 10.5p (excluding the electricity standing charge).
Tariff reform narrows the gap, but a poorly designed or commissioned system can erase the advantage entirely. Design quality matters as much as pricing.
The electricity standing charge is 54.83p a day, almost double the gas charge. It is capped only for default tariffs and varies by region. Asked why electricity was excluded, the Government pointed to the removal of VAT from electricity bills, a measure that runs only to March 2027.
The answer is not symmetrical abolition. Moving the electricity standing charge onto unit rates would raise the price ratio and shift network costs towards homes without solar PV. The better lever is taking legacy policy costs off electricity bills altogether.
If government proceeds, five conditions should apply:
Rebalance, don’t absorb. Exchequer money is better spent cutting electricity costs. Moving the remaining Renewables Obligation and Feed-in Tariff levies to taxation would cost about £1.7bn a year. Combined with gas rebalancing, Nesta estimates it would bring the ratio to 2.59.
Set out the electricity plan beyond March 2027, so the VAT cut is not quietly reversed while the gas change stays.
Protect the exit. Introduce standardised, low-cost meter capping for households that install heat pumps, so the incentive to leave gas is not lost.
Adopt a price ratio target and report against it, so tariff changes are judged by their effect on heat decarbonisation, not only on headline bills.
Pair tariff reform with design and installation quality. A price signal is only as good as the SCOP the installed system achieves.
Removing the gas standing charge could be a sensible first move. On its own, and especially if paid for by taxpayers, it is bill relief that happens to touch heating, not a heat decarbonisation policy.
As we await the Budget, the chancellor and the energy secretary should report back with the electricity side of the ledger as part of the same policy objective.
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The administration period for entities of offsite specialist Merit has been extended by 12 months. Merit Holdings Ltd – the main trading arm of Merit Group Services Ltd – ceased operating last year after entering administration, owing creditors £31m. On Wednesday (28 October), insolvency specialist…
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Laing O’Rourke raised concerns in 2008 about the fire-safety compliance of Kingspan insulation specified for a Bury development which was later remediated, court documents reveal. A query sent to architect BDP in December 2008, more than eight years before the Grenfell Tower fire, questioned the…
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An employment tribunal has dismissed a sexual harassment claim by a former Skanska employee filed almost 17 years out of time. The claim was lodged earlier this year, just months after the female former employee unsuccessfully sought a £12m settlement from the company. London South…
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Chasetown Civil Engineering is aiming to achieve £150m in revenue within the next four years, the company has said. According to its latest results, the firm posted a 24 per cent increase in turnover to £103.7m for the 12 months to the end of December…
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Graham has been appointed by Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to fit out five floors of office space at Ireland House in central London. The building at 10 Spring Gardens will accommodate the Embassy of Ireland, including its public-facing citizen services office, alongside…
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Robertson Construction has reached financial close on a contract to refurbish and extend a primary school in Aberdeen. The client, Aberdeen City Council, said the deal is worth £29m. The project is being delivered through Hub North Scotland’s North Schools Programme on behalf of the…
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