The Building Safety Regulator was created to do something essential: ensure that the failures that led to the Grenfell Tower fire cannot happen again. That purpose is not in question. What is in question — and what the industry is increasingly vocal about — is whether the way the regime has been implemented is creating a new problem alongside the one it was designed to solve.
The BSR's Gateway 2 process has become a genuine choke point for high-rise housing delivery in England. Projects cannot begin construction until approval is granted. Approval is taking an average of 36 weeks. A high proportion of submissions are being rejected or returned. Guidance is inconsistent. Pre-submission engagement is weak. And the regulator, by its own and the industry's account, is under-resourced for the volume and complexity of work it has been asked to do.
The paradox this creates is real. A regime designed to deliver safer buildings risks slowing down the delivery of those buildings to a point where housing targets become harder to meet, development viability is threatened and the costs of the new standard are ultimately absorbed by the very residents it was intended to protect.
How Gateway 2 Became a Choke Point
The three-gateway structure of the BSR regime is logical in design. Gateway 1 addresses planning and early fire safety; Gateway 2 is the pre-construction technical approval; Gateway 3 is the completion sign-off before occupation. Each stage has a statutory timeframe. Each is intended to be a structured check, not an open-ended review.
In practice, Gateway 2 has become something closer to the latter. The level of technical detail the BSR requires is high — higher than many teams anticipated when they first engaged with the regime. Compliance statements must be specific to the building, not generic. Fire strategies must address the actual design in depth. Duty holder competence evidence must reference frameworks that many professionals had never encountered before the Building Safety Act came into force. And all of this must arrive as a coherent, internally consistent package in which every document tells the same story.
Teams that underestimated this standard have experienced it most acutely. Submissions assembled from outputs that were designed for other purposes — planning documents, CDM files, architect's specifications — frequently do not meet the BSR's threshold. The result is a requisition or a rejection, the statutory clock pauses, and weeks are added to a programme that was already tight.
The Regulator's Own Constraints
The BSR's difficulties are not solely attributable to applicant quality. The regulator entered operation with a mandate that outstripped its immediate capacity. Staffing levels, technical resource and the clarity of its own guidance have all been cited as significant factors in the delays and inconsistencies the industry has experienced.
Guidance that varies in interpretation across different BSR teams creates a problem for applicants preparing submissions. A team that received feedback on one submission may apply those lessons to a subsequent one, only to find that a different assessor takes a different view. That inconsistency is not systemic to the legislation — it is a symptom of a regulator that has grown too quickly for its internal processes to keep pace.
The BSR has acknowledged these issues. New staffing, engineering resource and leadership changes have been put in place. Quarterly data publications have increased transparency. A fast-track process for certain application categories has been introduced. These are meaningful steps. But the gap between the statutory target of eight weeks and the operational reality of 36 is not closed by good intentions alone.
A regime designed to deliver safer buildings risks slowing their delivery to the point where the safety it creates becomes part of the problem.
The Housing Delivery Consequence
High-rise residential development is not optional in dense urban areas. The geometry of housing delivery in London and other major cities makes tall buildings a necessary part of the answer to a housing shortfall that has been building for decades. If Gateway 2 adds six to nine months to the pre-construction phase of every significant scheme — on top of the time already consumed by planning, design and procurement — the aggregate effect on housing supply is not trivial.
Developers face higher risk on every project that enters the BSR's queue: greater timeline uncertainty, increased holding costs, financing constraints that tighten as programmes slip, and the real possibility that market conditions shift materially between design completion and construction start. Some projects will absorb that risk. Others will not. The ones that do not will not be built, and the homes they would have provided will not exist.
The cost pressure created by the regime is also likely to flow through to the eventual residents of the buildings it governs. Compliance costs, holding costs and the professional fees associated with BSR engagement are not absorbed by developers as a matter of public spirit. They are priced into schemes. In the affordable housing context, where viability calculations are already stretched, that pricing-in has direct consequences for the quantity of affordable units that can be delivered.
What Improvement Looks Like
The government has signalled its awareness of the problem. Reforms including fast-track processes, additional BSR resource and improved applicant guidance are moving in the right direction. The BSR's recent progress on Gateway 2 processing times — median decisions falling toward four weeks for standard applications under the new batching model — is a genuine improvement, even if it reflects only part of the picture.
What the industry can do in the meantime is within its own control. The single most effective intervention available to any development team facing Gateway 2 is to start compliance work earlier, with greater rigour, using people who understand what the BSR expects. The rejection rate is not primarily a function of the BSR's capacity — it is a function of submission quality. Improving that quality is not the regulator's responsibility. It is the applicant's.
What Practitioners Should Be Doing Now
- Prepare early and completely. A Gateway 2 submission that arrives incomplete will be requisitioned or rejected regardless of how efficient the BSR's processing has become. There is no shortcut through the preparation phase.
- Engage before you submit. Pre-submission engagement with the BSR, or with specialists who understand the regime's expectations in depth, remains the most reliable way to identify and address weaknesses before they become formal requisitions.
- Build programme contingency into Gateway 2. Until processing times are consistently within the statutory target, every project team should plan for a Gateway 2 timeline well in excess of eight weeks. Financing structures, delivery schedules and contractor mobilisation dates all need to reflect that reality.
- Watch the quarterly data. The BSR's quarterly publications track application volumes, decision times and approval rates. Teams navigating live submissions should be monitoring these figures alongside the regulatory reforms that accompany them.
- Standardise documentation frameworks across projects. Organisations with a pipeline of higher-risk building schemes should be developing internal compliance documentation standards rather than starting from scratch on each project.
Safety and Delivery Together
The BSR regime is necessary. The standards it imposes exist because the previous system allowed catastrophic failures to persist for decades without correction. That purpose should not be diluted — and the industry should resist the temptation to frame compliance as an obstacle to be minimised rather than a standard to be met.
But safety and delivery are not opposing forces. A well-resourced regulator, operating with clear and consistent guidance, processing complete and well-evidenced submissions efficiently: that is a system in which safe buildings are built on time. Getting to that point requires both sides to hold up their end. The BSR is being asked to improve its processes. The industry needs to improve its submissions. Both things need to happen at the same time.