Members of the Institution of Civil Engineers can now apply for the Kenneth Watson Travel Award and the Queen’s Jubilee Scholarship Trust (Quest) Travel Award to fund overseas study of infrastructure and engineering practice. Both schemes support early-career and mid-career engineers to investigate specific technical themes abroad, such as major bridge projects, geotechnical innovations or climate-resilient flood defences, and bring findings back to UK practice. Applicants must propose a structured travel plan with clear learning objectives and dissemination routes, making these grants useful for targeted technical upskilling rather than general travel.

Publication of New Zealand’s 30‑year infrastructure strategy draws directly on the Institution of Civil Engineers’ Enabling Better Infrastructure (EBI) programme, which promotes outcome‑based planning, whole‑life cost analysis and resilience to climate risks. The plan uses EBI’s structured decision‑making framework to prioritise transport, water and energy investments, embedding asset management over multiple renewal cycles rather than single‑project funding. For practitioners, this signals growing international convergence on common planning tools and metrics, easing benchmarking of service levels, risk appetite and long‑term performance across jurisdictions.

SME house-builders are sharply curbing speculative development, with 70% of Home Builders Federation members saying current market conditions limit their ability to start new sites and 27% expecting to cut land acquisitions in the next three months. Only 41% expect to increase housing starts in the next quarter, sentiment is strongly negative in London (57% negative, 14% positive), and firms building fewer than 75 homes a year are the least optimistic. Developers face compounding cost pressures from a doubling Landfill Tax, a new £340m-per-year levy on new homes, Biodiversity Net Gain, the Residential Property Developer Tax, Building Safety Levy and the forthcoming Future Homes Standard adding an estimated 3–8% to build costs.