Gateway 2, and the backlog that is finally clearing

Under the Building Safety Act 2022, a higher-risk building cannot simply be designed and built. It passes through three gateways. Gateway 1 sits at planning. Gateway 2 is the one that stops the diggers: before construction can start on a higher-risk building, the Building Safety Regulator has to approve the design against the building regulations. Gateway 3 comes at completion, before anyone can occupy. A higher-risk building here means one at least 18 metres tall, or at least seven storeys, with two or more residential units.

Gateway 2 was meant to be a hard, deliberate check. For a while it became a bottleneck instead.

How slow it got

Through much of 2025 the numbers were difficult to defend. At the worst point, some Gateway 2 decisions in London were taking around 48 weeks, with the national picture not far behind at roughly 43 weeks for new build (Building Safety Regulator figures reported across the construction press, 2025). Remediation applications, the works to fix unsafe cladding and other defects on existing blocks, were running at around 33 weeks. Projects slipped 12 to 18 months. Schemes with finance in place sat waiting for a decision that the statute had set at 12 weeks.

The cause was not mystery. A new regime, a specialist multi-disciplinary review for every application, and more submissions than the regulator was resourced to turn around. Incomplete applications made it worse, because a file missing the right information goes back round rather than through.

Where it stands in 2026

The position in the first half of 2026 is markedly better. The Building Safety Regulator has reported average Gateway 2 decision times down to about 13 to 14 weeks, with some non-complex cases now landing inside the statutory 12-week period, and an approval rate of around 75 per cent across the preceding 12 weeks (Building Safety Regulator, 2026). The legacy backlog of new-build applications has been all but cleared, down to a couple of dozen cases from a queue that once ran into the hundreds.

The heavier part of the caseload now is remediation. Roughly 280 remediation schemes were still averaging about 34 weeks, which matters because those are the buildings people already live in. The regulator has set itself a target of responding to non-complex Gateway 2 applications within 18 weeks, and non-complex remediation cases within 12 weeks, by the end of March 2027.

What changed operationally is worth noting, because it tells you how to get through cleanly. The regulator introduced batch processing for near-identical schemes, such as repeated house types across a site, and a separate pathway that pulls genuinely complex or novel buildings out of the ordinary queue so they do not hold up the straightforward ones. More assessors were brought in. The single biggest lever, though, sits with the applicant: a complete, well-ordered submission is the one that moves.

What a Gateway 2 application still has to prove

Faster does not mean lighter. Gateway 2 still asks you to demonstrate, on paper, that the building as designed meets the building regulations and that you have a credible plan to manage safety through construction. That means the drawings, the fire and structural strategies, the change-control approach, and a clear golden thread of who decided what and when. An application that arrives as a tidy, indexed, current set of documents reads very differently from one assembled in a hurry from several inboxes.

Where SAMRISK fits

Most of the delay in a bad application is not the regulator, it is the fortnight spent finding the current version of a drawing, or reconciling three copies of a strategy that no longer agree. That is the problem SAMRISK is built to remove.

The building's documents and plans live in one place, versioned and dated, so the set you submit is the set that is actually current. The safety case is maintained as the design develops rather than reconstructed at the deadline. The compliance calendar holds the gateway dates and the conditions attached to an approval, so nothing that was promised to the regulator quietly lapses once construction starts.

The gateway is a check on whether you can show your work. The teams that pass it first time are the ones who kept the record straight all along, not the ones who went looking for it the week before submission.