BPH acts for developers, private clients, investors, estates, family offices, architects and interior designers. BPH is a director-led consultancy, with senior involvement maintained throughout every appointment.
Four client-side disciplines, each explained in full further down this page. We match the level of cost detail to the project stage, from early estimates to measured cost plans and market-tested tenders.
Independent cost advice from inception through to the agreed final account. PQS refers to the private, client-side quantity surveying role: acting for you, not the contractor.
Administering the building contract on the client's behalf, to the timetable the contract sets.
Holding the programme, the procurement route and the consultant team together.
Getting the price, the scope and the programme right before anyone is on site.
Instead of appointing one main contractor to manage the specialist supply chain, the client appoints the trade contractors directly while BPH coordinates the packages, programme and commercial controls.
It can also remove the main contractor's overheads-and-profit layer from the trade packages.
Support can begin with a single cost plan and grow into procurement, contract administration and wider commercial responsibility.
Feasibility, budget and development appraisal, alongside RIBA stages 0 to 1
Cost plan, programme and procurement route, developed and updated as the design firms up through RIBA stages 2 to 4
Documentation, pricing and adjudication, timed to suit the procurement route rather than a fixed point
Certification, instructions and change control once work starts on site
Cost, risk and decisions, reported from the first estimate onwards rather than only once on site
Final account, retention and close-out at handover
These stages run alongside your architect's design work.
Client-side quantity surveying means someone is acting for you, not the contractor, on every figure that changes hands. Bring a QS in as soon as you have a rough design, and keep them involved through tendering, valuations and the final account.
Without independent cost advice, you are relying on the contractor's own figures to tell you whether the contractor's own figures are fair. Budgets drift, tenders are hard to compare like-for-like, and valuations and variations tend to move in the contractor's favour unless someone is checking them.
A QS works alongside your architect from the earliest stage, testing the cost of design decisions before they are made, and alongside whoever administers the contract once work is on site, checking every certificate and variation that follows.
In practice: your builder's quotation looks reasonable, but you want an independent check of the pricing and what's actually included before you sign.
Contract administration means running the building contract once work is on site: certifying payment, issuing instructions, deciding extensions of time. Where the contract uses an Employer's Agent instead, typically a JCT Design and Build form, the role acts as your single point of contact with the contractor rather than as an impartial certifier.
Without someone in this role, instructions and payment decisions get made informally, on site, under pressure. Extensions of time and loss-and-expense claims that should be assessed against the contract get agreed on gut feel instead, and that habit is expensive to unwind later.
This role has to be exercised impartially between you and the contractor, even though you are the one paying the fee: that is what the contract requires. It works closely with whoever holds the quantity surveying role, since certification and valuation go hand in hand.
In practice: the contractor asks for more time and money because of a delay. The decision is what the contract actually entitles them to, not what either side would prefer. Or your contract is a design-and-build form, and you need one clear point of contact administering it on your behalf.
Project management means coordinating your objectives, your consultants, the programme and the decisions between them, whatever procurement route you use. It is not tied to a traditional main contract, and it is not another name for construction management: a project manager can work alongside either route.
Without this coordination, decisions and information stall between consultants who each assume someone else is chasing them. On a project with several trades and consultants, a single delayed decision from you can hold up more than one of them at once, with nobody tracking the knock-on effect.
More useful on larger or more complex projects with several consultants than on a single-contractor job. If you are also weighing up appointing trade contractors directly rather than a single main contractor, project management sits alongside that decision rather than replacing it. See Construction Management for how that route works.
In practice: several trades and consultants need to be sequenced correctly, and a decision from you is holding up more than one of them.
Feasibility and cost planning tests what a scheme can realistically cost from the earliest sketch, then prepares the scope properly so a tender comes back priced against something complete rather than something ambiguous.
Without this, an unaffordable design only becomes visible once tenders land, by which point months and a meaningful design fee have already gone into getting there, and every option left is a compromise made under pressure.
This works alongside your architect from the earliest concept, testing cost against ambition at each stage rather than only once, and feeds directly into the quantity surveying and contract administration that follow once you are ready to build.
In practice: your architect has produced a striking early concept, and you need to know whether it is within reach before spending more on developing the design.
Often, yes, though it depends what your architect's appointment already covers. Some architects include basic cost advice; few will run a full cost plan, compare tenders line-by-line, or check valuations as the job progresses. Ask what's in your architect's appointment first, then we can tell you what's genuinely missing.
Yes. We can check a quotation against the drawings and specification, flag anything missing or ambiguous, and give you an honest view of whether the price looks right before you commit.
It happens more often than not. We'll work through the options with you: reducing scope, re-specifying materials, re-tendering, or adjusting the budget itself, so you make that decision with full information rather than under pressure.
Whoever holds the contract administration or quantity surveying role on your appointment. Left unchecked, valuations and variations tend to drift in the contractor's favour over the course of a project, which is exactly what this role exists to catch.
As early as you can, ideally once you have a rough design and before you go to tender. Early advice is cheaper to act on than advice that arrives after a contractor is already on site.
We advise private clients, developers, estates and design teams on projects from £500,000 to £35 million and above. The scope of our appointment scales with the project: the team structure, reporting and level of involvement are tailored accordingly. Our professionalism, attention to detail and discretion remain consistent.
BPH supports developers with the same disciplines used across our client-side appointments, applied to the particular pressures of a development programme: cost certainty, viability and cash flow, from appraisal through to delivery.
This is cost and commercial support for the developer's own team, not a property valuation or a lender-side monitoring appointment.
Where a development is being delivered by appointing trade contractors directly rather than through a main contractor, see Construction Management.