Gateway 2 Is Delaying Your Project — Who Bears the Risk, and How to Protect Your Programme

If you are developing or delivering a higher-risk building in the UK, the single biggest threat to your programme right now is not the weather, the supply chain, or labour — it is Gateway 2. The Building Safety Regulator’s pre-construction approval stage has become a bottleneck, and for many projects it is the difference between starting on site this quarter or next year.

The numbers tell the story. Through 2025, turnaround times for some Gateway 2 applications stretched to more than 30 weeks, with a number of schemes falling 12 to 18 months behind their original programmes. Operational changes late in 2025 have started to bring new-build decisions down toward the statutory 12-week target, but remediation cases remain slow — recent data shows approvals taking around 43 weeks with an approval rate of roughly 40%. In other words, the picture is improving for new buildings but is still volatile, and you cannot plan on certainty.

What Gateway 2 actually is

Gateway 2 is the hard stop before construction on a higher-risk building — generally buildings of at least 18 metres or seven storeys containing two or more residential units. You cannot start building work until the Building Safety Regulator has approved your application. It is not a rubber stamp: the Regulator is checking that the design demonstrably meets the functional requirements of the Building Regulations, and that the information — the drawings, specifications, and the emerging golden thread of information — is complete, competent, and coherent. Thin or contradictory submissions are the fastest route to a rejection or a request for further information, and every round trip adds weeks.

Who bears the risk when Gateway 2 delays your project?

This is where SME clients and contractors are getting caught out. A delay at Gateway 2 sits in an awkward gap that most standard contracts were never written to handle. Depending on your procurement route and the wording of your building contract, the exposure can fall in very different places:

• The client may carry the cost of extended professional fees, finance holding costs, and delayed revenue if the delay is treated as a neutral or client-risk event.
• The contractor may be exposed if they have taken programme risk on a design-and-build basis and the contract does not carve out regulatory approval as a relevant event.
• The design team can be drawn in if the delay is caused by an inadequate or incomplete submission rather than the Regulator’s own backlog.

The practical answer is to decide this deliberately, in writing, before you submit — not to argue about it afterwards. Whether you are on a JCT or NEC form, the Gateway 2 approval period should be named as a specific event with an agreed mechanism for time, and ideally money. Leaving it to the general “statutory undertaker” or “change in law” clauses is how disputes start.

Five ways to protect your programme

You cannot control the Regulator’s queue, but you can control the quality of what you submit and how your programme absorbs the wait. In practice, the projects that get through cleanly do a handful of things well.

• Submit a complete, competent application first time. The biggest avoidable delays come from applications that trigger requests for further information. Treat the submission as a single, coordinated information deliverable, not a bundle of separate consultant outputs.
• Consider a staged application. The Regulator now accepts staged submissions for some new higher-risk buildings — separating groundworks and foundations from the superstructure — which can let enabling works begin sooner.
• Build the approval window into the programme honestly. Plan for the realistic duration, not the statutory best case, and make the Gateway a visible milestone on your design programme so every consultant is working to the same deadline.
• Put it on the risk register with an owner and a mitigation. Gateway 2 delay should be one of the top entries on your construction risk register, with a named owner and a costed contingency.
• Keep the golden thread clean from day one. The information you submit at Gateway 2 becomes the spine of the building’s safety case. Sloppy version control now creates a rejection at the gate and a liability later.

The bottom line for SMEs

Gateway 2 is not going away, and for smaller developers without a large in-house technical team it is where projects quietly lose months. The good news is that most of the delay is manageable: a well-coordinated, competent submission moves faster than a rushed one, and clear contractual allocation of the risk turns a potential dispute into a planned event. Get the information right, name the risk, and protect the programme before you submit — not after the clock has already started.

Facing a Gateway 2 submission and unsure your information is ready? JC Virtual PMs helps SME clients and contractors coordinate design information, manage the approval risk, and keep higher-risk building projects on programme. Get in touch to talk it through.