The plan to cut the gateway 2 backlog: Key points from Tuesday’s parliamentary hearings on the Building Safety Regulator

It’s hard to think of a thornier issue in construction currently than the Gateway 2 process. Since its initial implementation in October 2023, the regulatory hard stop before site work begins has become a major obstacle to delivery, with delays as long as a year being cited for a process which is meant to take 12 weeks.

Get a group of built environment professionals in a room and it will not be long before the topic bubbles to the surface.

As it happens, this is exactly what both Houses of Parliament did on Tuesday. The Commons’ Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee held a one-off evidence session looking at the Building Safety Regulator (BSR), while in the House of Lords the Industry and Regulators Committee continued its own inquiry into the regulator.

The sessions featured Andy Roe, the new non-executive chair of the BSR, Judith Hackitt, who led a review of regulations post-Grenfell, as well as industry leaders across the development and building control sectors.

They gave an outline of how the regulator, fresh from a leadership overhaul and in the process of a migration from the Health and Safety Executive to the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), plans to cut its backlog of cases. But it also revealed some of the continuing challenges it faces in achieving this goal. 

So what did we learn?

Ambitious targets from new leadership

The government announced it would make the BSR an executive agency of MHCLG in June as part of a wider shake-up of the regulator, which included the creation of a new board. Despite this statement of intent from the government, there was a degree of scepticism in the industry about whether the board’s chair, the former commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, would be the best person to cut delays.

However, in his appearance in front of the Commons committee, Andy Roe cut a determined figure. Describing himself as a “born optimist”, he set out his attention to significantly reduce delays by the end of this year. Roe said that while tens of thousands of homes were currently being held up, this was spread across just 154 new build applications. 

“This is something we can get to and reasonably turn around,” he said. “If we have not shown very significant change by the end of the calendar year, we run the risk of losing the complete confidence of everyone in the regulatory regime.” However, he stopped short of an absolute commitment that the BSR would comply with its 12-week statutory target for determining applications by the year’s end, saying only that there would be “a very significant reduction” in the backlog.

But how do they actually plan to achieve this?

Regulator finally moving to increase engagement

If there was some degree of tension between applicants and the regulator in the early days of the regime, it was not helped by the period of finger pointing between the two. The regulator, for its part, said the quality of application submissions was poor, calling on the sector to “step up”. Meanwhile, the industry complained that they had little idea of what exactly the regulator expected or wanted, and that it was very difficult to get clear answers.

One of the initial motives behind the new regime was to make building control more independent, with the previous system seen as having created too cosy a relationship between designers and regulators. But after a year of the new regime, there was a sense in the sector that the baby had been thrown out with the bathwater.

On the evidence of the committee hearings, things have improved somewhat. Seven guidance notes published in July by the Construction Leadership Council, which is co-chaired by the government, may have helped. But there were also indications of a change in approach within the regulator. 

Allan Binns, director at building safety firm Project 4, told the housing committee that they were starting to have “a lot more of these early engagement sessions happening” and that it was involved in conversations with the BSR about introducing “relationship managers” for developers with large portfolios, to help the regulator understand the coming pipeline.

Dame Judith Hackitt stressed to the House of Commons housing committee that there really had been an issue with the quality. “I have seen some examples of the gateway 2 applications that the regulator has had to deal with, and some of them are shockingly bad, so it is not surprising that they get pushed back and so on,” she said, while adding that there had been “a sea change on both sides in recent months in terms of that willingness to work together in collaboration”.

In his evidence, which followed that of Binns and Hackitt, Roe confirmed that they were in the process of hiring “account managers”, which would be similar to the “relationship managers” alluded to by Binns. “We do want to work either regionally, or with big developers, or with a very large remediation scheme,” said Roe. 

His director of operations, John Palmer, added that, in the longer term, they were looking at how they might introduce a pre-application service. “What we are looking at is whether there are any technological ways that we can help with that, such as possible AI early screening of applications, to give applicants an indication of whether they are red, amber or green, and to save them and the BSR a lot of time before things get in the door,” he said.

‘Dysfunctional’ MDT system in the process of being replaced

After initially blaming delays on poor quality submissions, the regulator has more recently admitted that its outsourced processing model had also contributed to issues.

Under its initial approach, work was farmed out to multi-disciplinary teams (MDT), which had to be procured for each individual application. Simply standing up these teams was taking roughly six weeks, creating an in-built delay amounting to around half the time that the regulator was meant to take to determine an application. 

Amid the organisational shake-up in June, MHCLG announced the creation of a new, more centralised “fast-track process”. But in Tuesday’s hearing, it was clear that there would be a more general move away from the MDT model. 

“It is a dysfunctional model; it does not work,” Roe stated unequivocally. The regulator will no longer be standing up individual teams for an individual application with a franchise method of control. Roe said the so-called fast-track unit was “a bit of a misnomer” and that it was “a different approach that I think will end up being the consolidated long-term approach”.

Instead, Roe said they would be focused on creating capacity to deal with applications in-house. He said his top priority of late had been “finding registered building inspectors to form a centralised unit where we take the delays out of the process”, and said he had been having meetings with the CLC, Local Authority Building Control, as well as Greater Manchester Combined Authority and the Greater London Authority, in an effort to bring in more registered building inspectors. The BSR is looking to create a 15-strong centralised team by the end of the month and Roe said it was currently half way to this goal. 

But while the system of establishing new MDTs for each application is gone, Roe said he was unable to fully move away from outsourcing work.  “We would have liked, originally, to get up closer to around 20 to 25 [in-house staff], but the reality is that we will probably have to look at some sort of hybrid model—some sort of contracting model,” he said. “That will involve us going to the big providers who are already on the HSE framework—some of the big companies that provide building control and technical services—and hive up some of the applications and funnel them back out that way.”

In the earlier session, industry figures gave their own suggestions for how the system could otherwise be sped up. Binns suggested the creation of a trusted partner scheme, whereby a developer who had never failed a gateway 2 approval could have slightly lighter regulation. “If we can get to a position where you have a trusted, licensed developer who undergoes scrutiny annually—something like that—to prove that they are going through the correct processes, that could be a way of expediting these things,” he said. Melanie Leech, chief executive of the British Property Federation, agreed but also warned against disadvantaging smaller developers.

Are things getting better or worse?

Some of the discussion of the committees concerned the publication of new figures, on the morning of the hearings, by Sky News. Citing data acquired through freedom of information (FOI) requests, the news organisation claimed that, as of 1 August, 156 applications, covering 34,965 new units, were stuck waiting for a decision. It also reported that the percentage of applications determined within a 12-week window was falling, from 47% at the end of September last year, to 32% by the end of March.

Asked about the figures, Binns at Project Four told the committee that “we have to” advise clients to build in 25 weeks for the gateway 2 process and that he had “not seen that number go down”.

Oddly, given that they supposedly came from the BSR via FOI, Andy Roe said he did not “recognise” Sky’s figures. “I do not know how they have got to them,” he said. Presenting what he said were “the most up-to-date stats”, Roe said there were currently 29,000 homes currently in the system, spread across 154 new build applications, while the new build approval median time was currently 43 weeks. 

Palmer added that the Sky News figures were “lagging a little bit”, noting that the centralised model had not been stood up until early August and that “you are not yet seeing the numbers coming through”.

On the industry side, Binns acknowledged that there had been some good signs recently. “The more historic ones were 40 or 50 weeks, now we are seeing applications that we have done more recently getting validation quicker,” he said, adding that there was “better dialogue there to keep us abreast of what is happening” and that he was getting “more and more confident” that times are coming down. “I think there is a lag with the data, at the end of the day, because you are only going to see applications that have been approved,” said Binns. “On the applications we start putting in today, we hope to see improvements there.”

Supply of building controllers and regulator’s IT systems remain obstacles

As hinted at in Roe’s evidence, supply of skilled building control professionals is a major concern. The government is in the process of recruiting more than 100 new staff to strengthen capacity at the regulator by the end of the year and the BPF’s Melanie Leech said she hoped it would recognise the importance of ensuring it was hiring people with high skill levels. She said they needed to “be prepared to pay the salaries that they may need to pay to get those skills, which may not be wholly consistent with civil service pay scales”, adding that the industry would “absolutely” be willing to pay a greater contribution in BSR gateway fees to enable this, as long as there were “commitments on delivery”.

In the House of Lords session, Lorna Stimpson, chief executive at LABC, said the sector “lost lots of people when we went through the registration” adding to staff shortages within an already “very aging community” suffering from the long-term effects of austerity-era underinvestment in local government. She said the public sector was now “facing competition for staff” from industry, ironically driven by delays in the regulatory process. “Tier one contractors now see building inspectors as a valuable commodity, and so they’re paying even more because it’s that building inspector that will be able to help a tier one contractor or a developer get through the gateway process with BSR, and so salaries are going up and up,” she said.

Stimpson added that staff pay structures within local authorities made it difficult for local authorities to compete with the private sector in attracting talent. “We’ve just put proposal to the independent panel for support in trying to make a special case for building control to be brought out of that single status so that local authorities are able to pay, building respect as what they need to pay them to retain them,” she said.

Darren Ettles, secretary at Association of Building Control Approvers, said part of the resourcing problem was that, within local authorities, building inspectors were carrying out duties - such as examining dangerous structures - that ought to be handled by structural engineers. “If we pulled those resources back to the restricted activities and functions, I think resources would be nearly enough,” he said.

Back in the Commons, Roe had his own ongoing obstacle to gripe about: IT. “One of the things I do not quite understand is the lack of an IT system that I would reckon is suitable,” he said. “There is a real challenge around digital and data at the heart of this. We need the ability to segregate data, provide data quickly and understand where applications are in the context of a region, a particular developer or a scheme”. He said his staff were working with “a product that I do not recognise as viable” and having to manually segregate data in order to understand where to focus their efforts. “That is an unnecessary amount of bureaucracy that has nothing to do with safety,” he lamented.

Tuesday’s sessions showed a BSR leadership acknowledging the scale of the challenge it faces, with ambitious goals for dealing with them. No doubt Roe will find himself back in front of MPs before too long. If he has not delivered on his promises by then, he might expect more of a grilling.