Westminster City Council has issued a 127‑page revised Code of Construction Practice that tightens controls on air quality, emissions, noise and highway/footway impacts for all demolition and construction projects in the borough. The CoCP requires developers to prioritise retrofit and refurbishment over demolition and rebuild, aligning with the council’s net zero targets of 2030 for its own operations and 2040 city-wide, and its Air Quality Action Plan (2025–2030) aiming for WHO guideline pollution levels by 2040. Contractors should expect stricter environmental standards, sustainability targets and community protection measures on future schemes.

The US Department of Energy has launched a $500 million funding call through its Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation to back demonstration and commercial-scale plants for critical minerals processing, battery materials manufacturing and recycling. Targeting lithium, graphite, nickel, copper, aluminium and other battery materials, the third-round programme will fund projects in three streams: processing from raw feedstocks, critical materials recycling, and battery component production. Officials including Assistant Secretary Audrey Robertson are pairing the domestic push with Indo-Pacific supply chain cooperation talks in Japan, signalling tighter upstream and midstream control for EV and grid-storage supply chains.

Government has accepted key Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce recommendations and pledged a “proportionate” regime for consenting new nuclear projects, including large gigawatt-scale plants and small modular reactors. Planned changes include streamlining Development Consent Order examinations, tighter statutory timescales for the Office for Nuclear Regulation and Environment Agency, and clearer interfaces with the generic design assessment process. For civil and geotechnical teams, this signals earlier certainty on site licensing, ground investigation programmes and nuclear island design, potentially reducing pre-construction delay and rework.