The three gateways, in plain terms

The higher-risk regime introduced a series of hard stops into the life of a building. They are called gateways, and there are three of them: one at planning, one before construction begins, and one at completion before anyone moves in. Each is a point where the project cannot proceed until the Building Safety Regulator is satisfied. The idea, drawn from the failures the Grenfell Tower Inquiry examined, is that safety is decided at the right moments rather than assumed at the end.

Why gateways exist at all

The old regime allowed building control sign-off to drift, with safety-critical decisions made late, changed quietly, or never properly recorded. The Building Safety Act 2022 replaced that with fixed checkpoints for higher-risk buildings, overseen by the Building Safety Regulator, which became the Building Control Authority for all higher-risk buildings in England in October 2023. A gateway is not a form to file; it is a condition that has to be met before the work can move on. The intention is that the project carries an accurate, current record of itself at each stage, which is the golden thread the Act keeps coming back to.

Gateway one, at planning

The first gateway sits at the planning application stage. Fire safety has to be considered early, with a fire statement addressing how the development's design accounts for it, so that fire safety shapes the scheme rather than being retrofitted after the massing and layout are fixed. It is the lightest of the three in day-to-day effort, but it sets the tone: safety is a design input from the start, not a checklist at handover.

Gateway two, before you build

The second gateway is the substantial one. Before construction begins, the Building Safety Regulator must approve the building control application for the higher-risk building. The Regulator has to be satisfied that the design meets the functional requirements of the building regulations before work starts on site. This is a genuine stop. Where previously a project might begin and resolve design details as it went, the second gateway pushes that resolution to the front.

It also changes how design changes are handled during construction. Significant changes cannot simply be absorbed; they have to go back through the Regulator. That is deliberate friction. The point is to stop the slow accumulation of undocumented variations that leaves the as-built building different from the approved one, with no record of how it drifted.

Gateway three, before occupation

The third gateway comes at completion. Before the building can be occupied, the Regulator must be satisfied that the work complies with the building regulations and that the required information has been handed over. This is where the golden thread is meant to pass intact from the construction team to whoever will run the building. The Accountable Person for the occupied building inherits the information needed to register it and to begin a safety case.

A clean third gateway is the difference between a manager who starts with the building's full record and one who spends two years reconstructing it from contractors' inboxes. We look at that inheritance in what BIM gives a building manager after handover.

The three at a glance

The table flattens a great deal of detail, but the shape is the useful part: a check before you design in earnest, a check before you build, and a check before you occupy.

What the gateways change for the people who run buildings

It is tempting to treat gateways as a construction problem that ends at handover. They are not. The third gateway hands the occupied building a record, and the quality of that record decides how hard the first years of management will be. A building that passed gateway three with a thin information package is a building whose Accountable Person starts on the back foot, rebuilding plans, specifications and the basis of the safety case from scratch.

So the gateways are worth understanding even from the occupation side. They tell you what should exist by the time you take the building on, and they give you a reason to ask for it. If the as-built plans, the external wall details and the maintenance information are not in the handover, the gateway process is the standard against which you can say they should have been.

Carrying the thread forward

The gateways were designed to make a building's information accurate and current at the points where it matters most. That intent does not stop at occupation; it is the same discipline the golden thread asks for through the building's life. Keeping the as-built record, the plans and the safety information in one place, current and traceable, is how the work the gateways forced gets preserved rather than lost.

SAMRISK is built to hold that record on the building from the day it is occupied, with plans, assessments and the safety case kept together rather than scattered. You can see how the building plans fit in on the building plans page, and how the safety case draws on them on the safety case page. This is general guidance rather than legal advice, and the precise gateway requirements for a specific project should be confirmed with the Regulator and your professional advisers.