The industry's attention has, understandably, been fixed on Gateway 2. Application backlogs, requisition rates, processing times: these are live concerns for every development team with a higher-risk building in the pipeline. But new data obtained through a Freedom of Information request by law firm Irwin Mitchell suggests that Gateway 3 — the final regulatory checkpoint before a completed building can be occupied — is quietly developing a problem of its own.
As of 21 January 2026, 44 higher-risk building schemes were still awaiting a Gateway 3 decision more than three months after submitting their applications. The BSR's statutory obligation is to determine these applications within eight weeks. Out of 158 Gateway 3 applications submitted in 2024, 55 took longer than three months to receive a decision. And in the most extreme case on record, one application took 550 days.
What Gateway 3 Actually Means
It is worth being precise about what is at stake here, because the consequences of a Gateway 3 delay are different in character from a Gateway 2 delay. At Gateway 2, the programme stalls before construction begins. Painful, expensive, but the building is not yet complete. At Gateway 3, the building is finished. The works are done. The contractor is standing down. And the entire scheme is sitting idle, unable to generate revenue, unable to be occupied, unable to begin its useful life — all because a regulatory decision has not been made.
Allan Binns, national director at building safety consultancy Project Four, put it plainly: a project typically carries its highest level of debt at the point of completion. A prolonged Gateway 3 delay does not merely frustrate residents waiting to move in. It threatens the financial viability of schemes outright. As Binns noted, these delays are not inconveniences at the margin — they are challenging feasibility entirely.
Vijay Bange, national head of construction at Irwin Mitchell, whose Freedom of Information request surfaced these figures, described the situation as financially damaging for developers and deeply frustrating for residents waiting to move into safe, modern homes. That framing matters. Gateway 3 is not an abstract regulatory process. It is the point at which buildings become homes.
The BSR's Position
The BSR has provided context for the delays. None of the affected cases, the regulator has stated, are buildings that went through the new Gateway 2 process introduced under the Building Safety Act 2022. All are what the BSR terms transitional legacy cases: projects caught between the previous and current regulatory regimes, designed and built under a different framework and now being assessed against the full standards of the new one.
The regulator has also noted that in some of these buildings it has identified significant safety issues and is working actively with applicants to bring them to the required standard before occupation is permitted. Read in the most generous possible light, this means the delays are not purely administrative. Some are the necessary consequence of genuine safety concerns being worked through.
That context does not, however, fully explain a 550-day case. Nor does it address the 44 schemes still waiting as of January. Transitional legacy status accounts for the category of cases in the queue; it does not account for the time it is taking to move through them.
At Gateway 3, the building is finished. The debt is at its peak. And the scheme cannot be occupied until the BSR says so.
A Regulator in Transition
The Gateway 3 data lands at a moment of considerable change at the BSR itself. In January 2026, the regulator was moved out of the Health and Safety Executive and reconstituted as an arm's-length body under the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. New leadership has been brought in: former London Fire Brigade commissioner Andy Roe and his ex-LFB colleague Charlie Pugsley, who is serving as interim chief executive.
The restructuring is a direct response to the problems that have accumulated in the gateway process. Roe has publicly acknowledged the anxiety the delays are causing and expressed confidence that the new leadership can turn things around. His framing was characteristically direct: it is their job to prove the sceptics wrong by building a system that works.
There is genuine reason for cautious optimism here. The BSR's investment in new leadership, a new organisational home and a more accountable structure represents a meaningful commitment to improvement. The progress at Gateway 2 under the batching model — median processing times falling to four weeks — demonstrates that the regulator can move when it has the right tools and focus.
But Bange's assessment deserves equal weight. Good intentions and structural change are necessary conditions for improvement, not sufficient ones. The transition to a standalone regulator creates the opportunity. Whether that opportunity is grasped depends on resourcing, on transparency and on the quality of the communication between the BSR and the applicants whose projects are in the queue.
What This Means For Your Project
If you are approaching Gateway 3 on a transitional legacy case, the honest assessment is that the queue is real and the timescales are uncertain. What you can control is the quality of your submission and the completeness of your as-built information. Gateway 3 applications that arrive with gaps, unresolved change control records, incomplete Golden Thread documentation or inadequate safety cases will draw queries that extend the wait. The BSR cannot issue a Completion Certificate on the basis of an incomplete case, regardless of the political pressure to move faster.
For projects that have gone through the full Gateway 2 process under the new regime, the picture is more reassuring. The BSR has confirmed these cases are not in the current backlog. A project that has been through a proper Gateway 2 process, with robust change control and a maintained Golden Thread throughout construction, should be better placed at Gateway 3 than the legacy cases currently generating concern.
The broader lesson remains the one this regime has taught from the beginning: preparation earlier in the process is the most reliable protection against delay at the end of it.
Source note: Gateway 3 delay statistics were obtained via Freedom of Information request by Irwin Mitchell and reported by James Wilmore in Construction News, February 2026. Quotes from Vijay Bange and Allan Binns are drawn from that reporting. This article is original commentary by BSR Compliance Service and does not reproduce source material.