Work still to be done by contractors and the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) to improve important gateway approval process
Problems continue to impact the Gateway 2 process as applicants struggle to provide the required information and the BSR works to clear a backlog in applications dating back to autumn 2024.
As reported by Building, the BSR has revealed that at present 75% of higher-risk building applications are being rejected due to vital information being incorrect or simply missing. Tim Galloway, deputy director of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) which oversees the BSR, explained that too many applicants “don’t quite as yet understand what is expected of them”.
The missing details are “fairly fundamental stuff”, he said and relate to “standards that are at least a decade and a half old in terms of what’s intended to be achieved, and that’s quite worrying that applications are not able to show fire safety and not able to show structural safety, which one would have expected”.
“What we have learned, I think, is that there’s more of a need for that investment in upfront design, that thinking to be done by those submitting the applications [happens] earlier, and that’s something that has required more transition for the industry than we’d expected.”
There has also been criticism of a lack of guidance on what the BSR is expecting, and Galloway explained that the BSR is now working with the Construction Leadership Council to provide more detailed guidance. However, he explained that the regulator is there to regulate, not to guide, and the construction sector itself should be the one leading on what is appropriate.
“I want industry to write that guidance, because it will be better than anything I could write,” he said. “You need people who have got that deep construction industry experience, who understand the process, understand the right phraseology, understand how the designers and the architects and the other players interact, because they will write it with that in mind.”
The BSR is also currently working to clear a backlog of approvals, with recent figures reported by Construction Enquirer News showing that only 14 out of 45 Gateway 2 projects and one out of 13 Gateway 3 projects have been approved after being taken on by the BSR. These applications came back to the BSR from private building control firms following their withdrawal from the market.
A statement from the HSE on these delays said: “We acknowledge there have been delays to processing approvals for building control applications and we are working to put this right.
“A backlog of complex in-flight higher risk projects which came into BSR after the collapse of private registered building control approver AIS Surveyors initially drove up processing times.
“However, as of February, following increased resourcing and new processes, processing time for new more complex, higher-risk building projects under Gateway 2 has decreased to an average of 16/17 weeks.
“Handling time for lower-risk category B projects is also now down to around 10 weeks. “
The statement also explained that the delays have also been caused by the standard of applications being received, saying “Outside of the backlog there are a small number of highly-complex ‘in build’ transitional cases which are not yet of a sufficient standard to be approved.
“We are taking a pragmatic approach to these cases to make sure building work can continue.
“We are confident that all the operational contingency measures we’ve put in place, including dedicated support from industry will also allow us to clear the applications in the backlog as we head into the new financial year.
“We also expect the handling time for new applications to continue to reduce as the operational contingency measures have impact.”
However, a number of contractors have called for the Gateway 2 system to be changed to speed up approvals, the lack of which they say is delaying construction work. Suggestions have included shifting approvals to the completion stage or to around six months before completion when high rises are structurally nearly complete.
One construction source explained that in their eyes, “the current system isn’t working but we all want to see safe buildings. We take pictures of everything for the Golden Thread so the proof will still be there for the end user and anyone who doesn’t comply with regulations will still be found out”.