From 1 October 2026, every major residential development in England will carry a new cost. The Building Safety Levy adds a per square metre charge to every building control application for schemes of 10 or more dwellings, and there are no transitional provisions for projects that have not yet submitted their applications.

Site clearance sounds simple. Strip the vegetation, clear the debris, hand over a clean platform. But on a live development project, the clearance phase is where ecological constraints, contamination surprises, and waste management obligations converge, and getting any of them wrong can hold up the entire construction programme.

Every construction project in Great Britain falls under CDM. But the regulations are referenced far more often than they are understood, and the consequences of getting duties wrong land on the people who signed the contract, not the people who drafted the health and safety policy.