Gateway approvals: improving consistency in BSR decision making

Since the introduction of the Building Safety Act 2022 (BSA), the UK's building safety landscape has undergone the most significant restructuring in a generation.

Conceived in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower tragedy and shaped by findings of the subsequent independent inquiry and Building a Safer Future report, the BSA was designed to create a more coherent, accountable and safety‑centred system for building design, construction and occupation. It covers building control, gateways, competence, design, defects and construction products.

Four years on, the first tranches of secondary legislation implementing the BSA are in place, bringing some of the most significant construction industry regulatory changes in 50 years.

• The Building Safety Regulator (BSR) is up and running.
• The regulatory scheme for higher-risk buildings (HRBs) and Gateways 1, 2 and 3 have been implemented.
• The Building Regulations dutyholder regime has been introduced.
• The Building (Registered Building Control Approvers etc.) (England) Regulations 2024 has substantially changed the way approvers relate to design teams.

The gap between the legislative ambition and reality, however, has been stark. While the statutory period for the BSR to review a new build Gateway 2 application is 12 weeks, the end of 2025 saw median approval times for legacy cases of 37 weeks.

The extended approval periods and unpredictable gateway application periods have substantially impeded development, leading developers and their financial backers to consider alternative development types outside the HRB gateway system such as data centres, storage and commercial.

Design teams have struggled to maintain continuity, and design quality has suffered in turn, as the unpredictability of the approval process and periods mean that projects stop-start and teams are moved around projects.

1. the low quality of many applications and
2. the subcontracting model used for assembling each multi-disciplinary team (MDT) it uses to review and approve Gateway 2 and 3 applications.

The HRB regulations were published in August 2023, and the system came into force six weeks later. However, the speed with which the system was introduced undermined application quality from the start.

With no applicant guidance on the level of information required or how it should be filed or presented when the system was introduced, application quality and format varied wildly; no one at that time knew what 'good' looked like.

Design for HRB applications can have thousands of drawings and associated documents, yet without any guidance, each applicant had to improvise the application arrangement and format.

Industry identified this as a problem immediately. However, calls for engagement, guidance and feedback seemingly fell on deaf ears.

Once an application has been prepared and submitted, the BSR had to assemble and allocate an MDT – whose members were typically contracted from other firms – to review the application. An MDT is comprised of:

• a case officer (usually in-house)
• a registered building control approver or registered building inspector
• a structural engineer
• a mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) engineer and
• a fire engineer.

Contracting, assembling and coordinating a new team for every application is cumbersome, and in some cases, it has taken five to six weeks before a team is even assembled.

Having allocated a team to an application, the review, communication and feedback processes were also reportedly inconsistent and fragmented.

Applicants reported that MDTs would often request information that had already been provided, and the level of scrutiny applied to applications appeared to vary, with similar applications receiving substantially different feedback depending on which MDT had been allocated.

Communication with applicants was very limited, and contacting the BSR's application team to understand the status of an application was difficult or impossible.

By late 2024 the outlook was bleak; HRB construction dropped precipitously, particularly in London where five boroughs recorded no affordable housing starts between April and September.

These delays and the drop in housebuilding attracted the attention of the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee (the Lords Select Committee). Following its series of hearings in the second half of 2025, at which RICS gave evidence, the committee published its report.

A joint initiative was established between the Construction Leadership Council (CLC), the BSR and industry stakeholders to develop a series of practical guidance notes and examples for those developing gateway applications.

The new guidance, which built on the CLC's Golden Thread Guidance published in August 2024, covered:

• design sufficiency
• information format and arrangement
• approval with requirements and later-stage applications and
• the post-Gateway 2 process.

Significantly, this initiative had substantial input from the BSR's policy teams and helped shape policy within the BSR as well as provide external guidance.

In June 2025, Phillip White stepped down as chief inspector of buildings at the BSR, which at this point was still within the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Lord Andy Roe became interim chair, and Charley Pugsley became interim chief executive officer; both had come from the London Fire Brigade.

Reforms soon followed, seemingly in light of feedback from the Lords Select Committee, including the introduction of the BSR Innovation Unit, specialised units for application streams, and application batching.

• The Innovation Unit uses a centralised, in-house MDT model and new processes to speed up applications.
• The new specialised streams include a new remediation unit that is like the Innovation Unit but focused on remediation applications, which have been noted as often being of poor quality.
• Application batching groups similar projects and uses the same MDT to assess all of them rather than creating a new team for each.

Communication has also improved substantially, with case officers more willing to hold workshops with applicants. The BSR has also set up key account managers for the larger developers so they can discuss applications pipelines – a very welcome development.

The results of these changes are substantial. For example, a reduction in median application time for new build from 43 weeks with a 39% approval rate in August 2025 to 22 weeks and 91% approval rate in August 2026.

However, external remediation remains significantly slower, with median approval periods of 34 weeks against a statutory target of just eight weeks for works to existing buildings.

Hopefully we are now entering a period of improved predictability and stability for the gateway system, and clients, designers and project teams can better predict programmes, restoring a degree of confidence in the system and attracting new investment.

In many ways, Gateway 3 poses a greater risk for clients and projects than Gateway 2. With clients being fully financially extended, having paid all the design and construction cost and waiting to use or let their buildings, any delays could be disastrous.

As of August 2026, there have been very few Gateway 3 applications for buildings under the HRB regime and no new-build projects that passed Gateway 2 under the HRB regime have yet reached Gateway 3. Project teams are struggling to predict how successfully industry and the BSR will handle the process.

Success or failure at Gateway 3 largely depends on the quality of planning and processes designed and put in place at Gateway 2, which set out what will be built, how that process will be managed and monitored, and how the as-built condition will be verified and recorded.

The success or failure of Gateway 3 applications will therefore raise interesting questions. Was it the design and process put in place at Gateway 2 that failed, the implementation of the plan and construction process, or design and process issues that the BSR missed at Gateway 2 but identified at Gateway 3 that resulted in rejection?

Progress to date at Gateway 3 has been less than positive, with no new-build Gateway 3 approvals in the BSR's May to August 2026 reporting data, one remediation approval and 13 internal works approvals. 

Achieving consistency in the interpretation of technical and design guidance during application reviews remains a fundamental challenge for the regulator.

When building control approvals were distributed among local authorities and approved inspectors, inconsistency in guidance interpretation was less visible even if it was just as prevalent.

However, with the BSR now acting as a central regulator, these variations have become more apparent, highlighting the need for a national framework to ensure consistent interpretation. The upcoming single construction regulator might be the right vehicle to establish this.

In January 2026, the BSR officially became independent of the HSE and became an executive agency. This is a step towards the government's target of creating an independent single construction regulator (SCR) with consolidated responsibility for buildings, products and professional oversight.

The SCR prospectus, published in December 2025, only gives very broad aspirations for positive change with little detail, so we will have to wait for further detail before we can see how this massive super-regulator will work.

Whatever its final structure, the SCR and whatever becomes the BSR within it, needs to bring greater industry expertise in-house to understand and robustly regulate the industry.

For industry, the past ten years have been a time of consistent turmoil; what we need now is a period of slow, steady predictable improvement.