Most local authority building control teams are already stretched. The Building Safety Levy (BSL) is about to add a meaningful new obligation on top of everything they’re already carrying… and it won’t wait until they’re ready.
The BSL goes live on 1 October 2026. Within weeks of your first chargeable applications landing, you’ll need to prepare your first quarterly return to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). That obligation isn’t discretionary, and the format isn’t yours to decide. You’ll be reporting in a prescribed structure, on a fixed schedule, every three months from that point forward.
What is yours to decide is how you manage the process that produces that return. Get it right, and quarterly reporting becomes a routine task. Get it wrong, and it becomes a significant piece of manual work, repeated four times a year, on top of everything else your team is already doing.
This blog explores what your new BSL reporting obligations will look like.
What the quarterly return requires
Your quarterly return to MHCLG needs to account for all your BSL activity across the period. It will include the applications you’ve received, the liability notices you’ve issued, the fee calculations behind them and the payments you’ve collected. For each chargeable development, the return draws on information that spans the full lifecycle of the application, from the moment it’s submitted to the point the levy is paid.
For each application, you’ll need to record the type and number of dwellings involved, including any that are exempt, and the floorspace calculations, specifically the chargeable accommodation and communal floorspace for each relevant residential building, measured in square metres. Those figures are what the levy rate is applied to, so they need to be accurate. A measurement error at that stage will affect the fee calculation, which, in turn, will affect what you report.
Where a development has been amended, you’ll also need to account for any previous levy liability notices issued, payments already made and any refunds that apply. The further along a development is, the more layered its history becomes.
None of this is especially complicated in isolation. The challenge is that it must all be structured, accurate and ready to report at the end of every quarter, while your data likely sits across multiple stages, often managed by more than one team.
Why the reporting burden is heavier than it looks
Your quarterly return is the product of every step that came before it, every measurement taken, every calculation made and every payment chased. If you handle any of those steps inconsistently, or record them in different places, you’ll feel it when reporting time comes.
Measuring the Gross Internal Area (GIA) of a development is a good example of where early errors can compound. Your levy fee is calculated from the chargeable floorspace. So, if your GIA measurements aren’t right, the fee won’t be right, and your return won’t be, either. If your team is working from plans in one system and recording measurements somewhere else, the risk of discrepancy is built into the process before you’ve started.
Data duplication creates the same kind of risk. Every time information has to be manually re-entered, either from an applicant’s submission into your back-office system or from your records into a reporting spreadsheet, you’re introducing another opportunity for things to diverge. By the time you sit down to compile your quarterly return, you might be reconciling figures that have been handled three or four times over.
There’s also the audit trail to consider. MHCLG can query figures, and if they do, you’ll need to show your workings. If your records are spread across emails, spreadsheets and separate systems, that process will be far more involved than it should be. The expectation built into the regulations is that your data is traceable, not that you can reconstruct it if challenged.
While building control will carry most of the BSL workload, your quarterly return will involve more than one team. Finance needs to know what’s been invoiced and what’s been paid. Planning may need to confirm whether planning permission is in place for a given development, since that affects levy liability in the first place.
If those teams are working from different systems, the only way to get everyone on the same page before each return is to go and ask. That means emails, phone calls and chasing updates that should already be visible. That might not be a huge problem for a single application, but over a quarter, it’s time that adds up and can compound when your data doesn’t quite match across departments, and someone has to work out why.
How our BSL module supports quarterly reporting
Resolution DM’s BSL compliance software is designed to help you capture and maintain your BSL data in the right structure throughout the quarter. Rather than treating quarterly reporting as a separate task, it treats it as the output of a well-run process, where the data has been captured correctly at every stage.
Applicants submit their BSL-specific applications through Submit-a-Plan, the same platform they already use for building control. We can configure the forms to your specific BSL requirements, so the information you need arrives in the right format.
From there, your team can view and measure floor plans directly within DataSpace Live, using built-in tools that calculate the chargeable floorspace without leaving the platform. Those measurements then feed directly into the automated fee calculation, producing an accurate, documented levy liability charge with a full audit trail.
Once the fee is issued, the system integrates with your existing payment infrastructure to track payment status across sites and individual plots.
And when your quarterly return is due, the data is already structured and ready. The reporting function pulls together the figures MHCLG requires, in the format it requires them.
The audit trail runs through the whole process. Every measurement, calculation and payment record is logged and traceable, so if MHCLG ever queries a figure, you have the evidence behind every decision you’ve made.
Getting your process right before your first return
The Building Safety Levy comes into force on 1 October 2026. That might seem like a few months away, but it will be here before you know it.
Your first quarterly return will follow quickly. If your process isn’t reliable by then, you’ll be dealing with data and compliance issues at the same time, which is a much harder position to recover from than setting things up correctly at the start.
So, if you’d like to see how our BSL compliance software handles the full process, we’d be happy to show you what it can do and how it can help your local authority meet its new reporting obligations.
Get in touch to arrange a demonstration.