The gateways are the three control points the Building Safety Act places across a higher-risk building project. Gateway 1 sits at the planning stage and addresses fire safety in the planning application. Gateway 2 must be passed before building work starts. Gateway 3 must be passed at completion, before the building is occupied.
Gateway 2 is a hard stop: building work cannot begin until the Building Safety Regulator has approved the application, and the regulator will not accept a project into construction on incomplete or poorly organised information. Decisions have widely been reported to take far longer than the statutory target, with rejections clustering on fire and facade documentation.
The practical lesson is that gateways are evidence checkpoints. A project that assembles its documentation as it goes clears them faster than one that reconstructs the record at submission.