From October 2026, your building control team will be responsible for a compliance process they’ve never had to manage before. The Building Safety Levy brings new obligations that go well beyond collecting an additional fee. When it goes live, your local authority will be responsible for the full administrative and compliance chain, including:
- Receiving BSL-specific applications
- Checking submissions
- Verifying Gross Internal Area (GIA) measurements
- Calculating fees
- Issuing charges
- Collecting payments
- Filing a quarterly return to MHCLG
All on top of the day-to-day pressures your team is already carrying.
Getting that process wrong can have real consequences. Unlike most of your work, where you can revisit and correct things if you need to, the BSL doesn’t give you much room to find your feet.
This article sets out what your new obligations will involve in practice, where the administrative pressure will land hardest, and how a structured approach to your BSL process can make a real difference to how your team manages it.
What the BSL process involves
The Building Safety Levy will apply to large new residential developments in England. The fee for each development is based on its GIA. That’s where the process begins and where accuracy is critical, because GIA is the foundation of every fee calculation. Get it wrong at this stage, and the error will carry through to the charge you issue, the payment you request and, ultimately, the figures you report to MHCLG.
Your team will need to receive BSL-specific applications and check that the information submitted is complete and in the right format. You’ll then need to verify the GIA from the floor plans provided. For larger or phased developments, this will involve calculating floor areas across individual plots and combining them into phases or reach a site master total. This task is more involved than it might first appear, particularly if you’re working from plans held in one system and doing the calculations elsewhere.
Once GIA is confirmed, you’ll need to apply the correct BSL fee schedule and issue the applicant a documented fee calculation. From there, you’ll request payment, track whether it’s been received and follow up on any outstanding balances. You can issue the certificate of completion only once full payment has been collected, which means payment tracking is a gateway step in the process.
Each of these stages creates extra work, which will need to be managed alongside your existing building control caseload, not instead of it.
The quarterly return
Every three months, you’ll be required to report your BSL activity to MHCLG in a prescribed format. That means your data must be accurate, structured and accessible throughout the quarter, not pieced together at the end of it.
The consequences of a poorly managed process will be most visible when you report. If your GIA figures aren’t consistently recorded, your payment tracking has gaps, or the data from different stages of the process sits across different systems, your quarterly return will likely become a significant piece of manual work.
Pulling figures together from memory, emails and spreadsheets while also keeping up with a regular caseload is a pressure most building control teams don’t need.
There’s also the audit trail to keep in mind. If MHCLG queries a figure, you’ll need to show where the GIA measurement came from, how the fee was calculated, when payment was requested and confirmed. That’s straightforward if your process is documented and connected. It will be considerably harder if the figures you need are spread across disparate systems.
BSL isn’t just a building control problem
While your building control team will primarily manage your BSL process, it will touch other parts of your authority, too. Planning details need to be included at the liability stage, because applications must be cross-referenced with planning permissions to establish whether a development is subject to the levy in the first place. Miss that step, and you risk either applying the levy to a development that doesn’t fall within scope or not applying it to one that does.
Your finance team also needs visibility of what’s been invoiced and what’s been received. If building control is managing that information separately, finance will need to chase for updates that should already be visible to them, which is an unnecessary drain on everyone’s time.
For many local authorities, these blurred lines between departments and who’s responsible for what make the BSL harder to manage. It’s a process that sits primarily within one Building Control but involves other departments. It requires different parts of your authority to work from the same data, at the same time, without anyone having to bridge the gaps between them manually.
Where do the problems lie?
The problems with taking a manual or fragmented approach to BSL compliance tend to start small.
A GIA calculation done in a spreadsheet rather than a connected system is harder to audit and easier to get wrong.
A fee schedule applied by hand introduces scope for inconsistency.
Data entered at one stage and re-entered at the next creates unnecessary duplication and multiple opportunities for errors to creep in.
These issues tend to compound as each quarterly return comes round. A GIA error in month one won’t just affect a single application. It can throw your entire quarter’s return off if it isn’t caught and corrected before you report. An untracked payment can create a discrepancy that could still be causing problems several weeks later. The further you get through a quarter with a fragmented process, the more difficult it becomes to produce a return you can stand behind.
And when it comes to tracking payments, if there’s no single view of what’s been requested, what’s been paid and what’s outstanding, someone must create it, manually, every time they need it. For a team processing multiple BSL applications across multiple developments at different stages, this can quickly become unsustainable.
How our BSL module supports the full process
Resolution Data Management’s BSL module is built specifically for local authority building control teams. It covers the full BSL compliance process, from initial application through to quarterly reporting.
BSL applications are submitted through Submit-a-Plan, the same platform your applicants already use for building control. The submission process is configured to your authority’s specific BSL requirements, so you receive the right information in the right format from the outset. Once applications are in, your team can view and measure floor plans directly within the system, using built-in tools to calculate and combine floor areas at plot and site master level.
Every measurement is recorded automatically, so your GIA figures are traceable and auditable without any additional steps.
Once GIA is verified, the system applies your authority’s BSL-specific fee schedule and produces a clear, documented fee calculation. That calculation goes to the applicant, and from there the platform tracks what’s been requested, what’s been received and what still needs chasing. This stage gives your administration team a real-time picture without having to look elsewhere for an update. The certificate of completion can only be issued once full payment has been collected, so the system enforces the process rather than relying on manual checks.
And when your quarterly return is due, your data is already structured in the format required by MHCLG.
Integration is what makes our platform different from other tools on the market. Because the module is built on Submit-a-Plan and DataSpace Live, the data flows continuously from submission to reporting without gaps or re-entry. No other provider currently combines a client-facing submission portal, integrated plan measurement and back-office BSL compliance tools in the same workflow.
The difference it can make to your local authority isn’t just about efficiency, though that’s real.
It’s about reliability. It gives you a process built on a proven system that connects every stage. It ensures your data is consistent, your audit trail is complete, and your quarterly return reflects what actually happened, rather than your best reconstruction of it.
See our BSL module in practice
The new BSL regulations come into force on 1 October 2026, and your first quarterly return will be due in early 2027. Getting a reliable process in place before that point is considerably more straightforward than trying to fix a broken one in the middle of your first reporting cycle.
If you’d like to see how our BSL compliance solution handles the full workflow, we’d be happy to walk you through it. Get in touch to arrange a demonstration with our team.