A project team submits a Gateway 2 application for a new higher-risk building, confident in the design, and hears nothing for months. Eventually a rejection notice arrives. It rarely says the fire strategy is wrong. More often, in the twelve weeks to the end of June 2026, the Building Safety Regulator received 517 applications for internal HRB work alone and recorded 299 of them as invalid or withdrawn, against only 237 that were actually decided. More applications failed to become valid than were ever assessed at all.
That statistic is the whole story of Gateway 2 in one line. The regime is not primarily a design review. It is a completeness test, and the completeness test is unforgiving by design.
Two applications, not one
The instrument that creates Gateway 2 is the Building (Higher-Risk Buildings Procedures) (England) Regulations 2023, SI 2023/909. Regulation 4 covers new HRB work, or a stage of it. Regulation 12 covers work to an existing HRB, split into category A and category B. The two regimes are not the same weight. For category B work, the applicant decides for themselves which of the standard documents are appropriate, under regulation 12(3)(e), and instead must supply what the regulation calls fire safety compliance information, sufficient plans to show how the work complies with Part B of the building regulations. Applying under the wrong category is, in the regulator’s own words, likely to get an application rejected outright.
For a new HRB, regulation 4(2) lists what has to accompany the application: a site plan, plans sufficient to show compliance, a competence declaration, a construction control plan, a change control plan, a mandatory occurrence reporting plan, a Building Regulations compliance statement, and a fire and emergency file. Schedule 1 to the regulations defines six of those seven documents in detail. The seventh, the mandatory occurrence reporting plan, is defined only in passing in regulation 2, by reference to the reporting system it describes. It is, on the face of the drafting, the thinnest specified document of the set, which is worth knowing before assuming every document carries the same weight.
Why the clock rarely starts when you think it does
The regulator must determine a valid application within twelve weeks for a new HRB, or eight weeks for existing HRB work, under regulation 5. The word doing all the work in that sentence is valid. Regulation 5(3) defines validity by reference to full compliance with regulation 4. An application missing one required element is not a slow application. It is not an application in the sense the clock cares about, and the twelve weeks never begins.
Three of the twelve weeks that do run are consumed by a mandatory 15 working day consultation with fire and rescue services under regulation 6, unless the regulator is already satisfied there are grounds to reject the application, in which case it can skip consultation entirely. That is the mechanism behind an odd but consistent pattern in the published data: rejections tend to be determined faster than approvals, because a clearly incomplete application never reaches the consultation stage at all.
The regulator’s own published figures bear this out. In its data release for the twelve weeks to 1 August 2026, the Building Safety Regulator reports that the median approval time for new HRB applications has fallen from 43 weeks a year earlier to 22 weeks, against an approval rate that has risen from 39 percent to 91 percent over the same period. Separately, Build UK’s own process guidance records that even at that improved rate, the regulator’s working target for the process is around 18 weeks, half again longer than the 12 weeks the regulations actually specify. The statute sets the floor. Operational reality sits above it.
What the regulator says actually causes rejection
Regulation 7(1) sets the grounds on which an application must be approved unless it falls foul of one of four tests: it fails to comply with regulation 4 or a direction made under regulation 59; it is not sufficiently detailed in any respect to let the regulator judge whether the work would comply with the building regulations; it shows the work would contravene the building regulations; or it shows the proposed strategies would breach a defined list of further regulations. In practice, ground (b), insufficient detail in any respect, is the one doing the most work, because a single under-specified element is enough on its own.
Build UK, collating the regulator’s own rejection feedback, lists the recurring themes: not containing sufficient detail; not meeting the legal requirements for HRB work; work that would contravene the building regulations; not adequately setting out how changes would be managed through construction; and not adequately setting out how the project would satisfy the requirements for the golden thread and mandatory occurrence reporting. The regulator’s own worked examples, organised by Approved Document, are specific rather than vague. On fire safety: “fire strategy drawings do not provide complete details of the fire safety features such as locations of dry risers, inlets, fire alarm panels, refuges, access controls etc”, and evacuation simulations that fail to include pre-travel time so the results do not actually show occupants reaching safety within five minutes. On structure: an “obvious lack of co-ordination between structural engineer’s loading document and façade design with loading assumptions and support points not matching”.
Two traps are stated by the regulator itself, in terms specific enough to be worth quoting directly. Do not upload a construction phase health and safety plan instead of a construction control plan; the application can be rejected on that basis alone. And the regulator has confirmed it will not provide advice to applicants on how to comply with the building regulations at any stage of the process, a real culture shift for an industry used to informal pre-application dialogue with building control.
The format question, and why over-submitting has a cost
The regulations themselves prescribe no file format. Regulation 59 lets the regulator direct how documents are given, which in practice means the online portal, where guidance requires PDFs under 1GB, named using only letters, numbers, spaces, hyphens and underscores, with documents submitted in the order the portal expects. Industry guidance from the Construction Leadership Council adds a rule worth building into a submission process rather than learning the hard way: “submitting more documents than is needed will not mean that the application is better, in fact it may lead to the need for a longer assessment process.” Everything approved at Gateway 2 becomes, under regulation 7(8), an agreed document, which the project is then bound to throughout construction under the change control regime. Uploading more than the regulations actually require does not buy goodwill. It buys a longer list of things that now require formal change control to alter.
None of this changes the substance of what good design or a good fire strategy looks like. What it changes is the discipline around the submission itself: apply under the correct category, supply exactly what regulation 4 or 12 requires, no more and no less, and treat the completeness of the application with the same rigour usually reserved for the design behind it. On the numbers the regulator has itself published, that discipline is the difference between a determination measured in weeks and one measured in the time it takes to resubmit.
Where to check this yourself
Every figure and quote above traces to the source below, and each is free to read directly.
- “How do I apply for Gateway 2 building control approval?” The Building Safety Regulator publishes the application guidance itself, free, at gov.uk.
- “What is the role of local authority building control under the new regime?” LABC represents building control bodies working alongside the regulator on higher-risk buildings; its own explanation is at labc.co.uk.
- “What fire safety information does a Gateway 2 application need?” The Institution of Fire Engineers is the UK’s professional body for fire engineers and fire safety practitioners, at ife.org.uk.
- “Does the Building Safety Act apply to my project?” RICS answers common scoping questions in its own FAQ at rics.org.
Fire safety design itself is governed in England by Approved Document B and by British Standards including BS 9999, the code of practice for fire safety design, management and use of buildings, published by BSI and summarised without purchase at BSI’s product page.