The Construction Leadership Council board is being expanded from nine to 15 members as government scraps its separate construction advisory panel, adding civil service figures including NISTA chief executive Becky Wood and Cabinet Office markets director Clare Gibbs alongside industry sponsor for people & skills Mark Farmer. New seats are allocated to each of the four strategic workstreams and four sector groups, bringing in ICE director general Janet Young for infrastructure, HBF chief executive Neil Jefferson for house-building, NHIC chief executive Anna Scothern for domestic RMI, and Scape chief executive Mark Robinson for places, assets and commissioning. A new health, safety & wellbeing group led by Berkeley Group’s Karl Whiteman and the planned 2026 CLC Strategy and Construction Industry Workforce Plan signal tighter central government influence over construction policy and skills planning.

Antidumping duties under the US Tariff Act of 1930 are proposed as a floating “price-gap” mechanism to counter China’s below-cost exports of rare earths and other USGS-designated critical minerals, with duties rising automatically as Chinese export prices fall. Erik Groves, corporate strategy and in-house counsel at Morgan Companies, argues this would extend the logic of the US Department of Defence’s floor-price agreement with MP Materials at Mountain Pass without Washington acting as buyer of last resort. Coordinated antidumping actions by the US, EU, Canada, Australia, Japan and South Korea could establish de facto price floors across multiple Western markets.

Updated planning guidance on flood risk and coastal change still leaves a regulatory gap for mandatory sustainable drainage systems (SuDS), argues Stuart Crisp, UK manager at Advanced Drainage Systems (ADS). He notes that, outside Schedule 3-type regimes, many English developments can proceed without adoptable SuDS features such as attenuation tanks, geocellular storage and permeable pavements, despite long-term surface water and groundwater flood risks. For civil and drainage designers, this keeps SuDS largely policy-led rather than enforceable, complicating investment in higher-spec systems and long-term maintenance planning.