JC Virtual PMs Podcast

The biggest procedural change to small planning applications in a decade comes into force on 31 October 2026, and it removes something most small developers have spent years managing around: the risk that a straightforward application gets pulled into a planning committee. The Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026 were made on 15 July 2026 and take effect at the end of October. England only; National Park authorities and the Broads Authority are excluded. The original target of 30 September slipped by a month because councils said they needed longer to amend their constitutions.

For most of the last decade, professional indemnity insurance was something a practice endured once a year. You filled in the proposal form, you braced for the number, and if you worked on anything with cladding on it you discovered which exclusions had appeared since last time. Something has changed in that transaction, and it is worth understanding because it converts a cost you cannot control into one you partly can. Underwriters have started pricing on evidence. Not on turnover bands and claims history alone, but on whether you can demonstrate that your design process is controlled. Which means the information management discipline that has always been difficult to justify commercially — the change register, the design freeze, the decision record — now has a number attached to it.

Ask ten people on a UK project who the principal designer is and you will get a confident answer. Ask them which principal designer you mean and the confidence usually evaporates. There are two. They are created by different legislation, they cover different things, they carry different competence requirements, and there is no rule that says the same organisation has to hold both. The Health and Safety Executive's own review of CDM 2015, which reported in May 2026, identified confusion arising from "similar but distinct roles under the Building Safety Act" and inconsistent interpretation across the market as a live problem — and it is one of the few things in that review that generated a commitment to new guidance. Until that guidance lands, the fix is contractual and it is straightforward. But you have to know what you are separating.

Ask three people how long Gateway 2 takes and you will get three answers, all of them technically correct, because there are three different sets of numbers in circulation and almost nobody distinguishes them. That matters commercially, because a contractor pricing to the statutory target and a client programming to the published median are twenty weeks apart, and somebody is going to pay for the difference.

There is a change to biodiversity net gain that came into effect on 6 August 2026 and that a great many small developers have not registered, because it arrived quietly in amendment regulations rather than as a headline announcement. It removes mandatory BNG from roughly half of all residential planning permissions in England. The test is an area threshold, and it is measured in a way that rewards paying attention at the point you draw the red line.