The Building Safety Regulator became fully operational in England under the Building Safety Act 2022 with a clear mandate: raise the bar on safety and accountability for every higher-risk building in the country. More than a year into that operation, the data is beginning to tell a story — and it is one the industry cannot afford to ignore.
As of early 2025, 1,019 higher-risk building applications have been recorded since the system came into force. Of those, somewhere between 45 and 50 percent have been rejected or marked invalid. Only 10 to 40 percent of Gateway 2 applications — the pre-construction approval that must be secured before a single foundation is dug — have been approved. The average wait for a Gateway 2 decision stands at 30 to 36 weeks. And developers are reporting costs of between £12,000 and £25,000 on applications that ultimately failed.
These are not teething problems. They are structural. They reflect a fundamental mismatch between the standard the BSR requires and the standard at which applications are arriving.
Volume Without Readiness
Application volumes have grown sharply. From 69 submissions in late 2023, the pipeline grew to nearly 500 by the end of 2024 — a sevenfold increase in just over a year. That trajectory reflects the industry catching up with the regime's requirements as more projects reached the Gateway 2 threshold. But approvals have not kept pace with submissions, and the gap between the two is the most telling number in the dataset.
A rising volume of applications is only meaningful if those applications are fit for purpose. What the rejection rate tells us is that a substantial proportion of the teams entering the BSR's process are doing so before their submissions are ready. The BSR does not reward early submission. It rewards complete, coherent and properly evidenced submissions — whenever they arrive.
Why Applications Are Failing
The BSR's own data on rejection reasons is instructive. Approximately 69 percent of rejected applications failed because they lacked the legally required technical detail. That is not ambiguity about what the regime requires. The Building (Higher-Risk Buildings Procedures) (England) Regulations 2023 set out the submission requirements precisely. The failure is one of preparation, not interpretation.
The most common failure modes cluster around a small number of recurring problems:
- Missing or inadequate fire safety and technical documentation. Compliance statements that do not address the specific design, fire strategies that are generic rather than project-specific, or structural narratives that lack the depth the BSR requires.
- Incorrect or incomplete documentation. Version mismatches between drawings and compliance statements, missing duty holder competence evidence, or absent construction control and MOR plans.
- Withdrawn submissions. Applications pulled back for rework after the BSR identified fundamental gaps during initial review — a pattern that adds weeks to the programme and signals that the submission was never ready to be lodged in the first place.
- Regulatory capacity constraints. The BSR has faced significant resourcing pressure since inception. Overloaded caseloads have contributed to inconsistent feedback and extended timescales, compounding the delays generated by the submission quality problems.
69% of rejected applications failed due to insufficient technical detail. The requirement was clear. The preparation was not.
The Real Cost of Getting It Wrong
The financial implications of a rejected or requisitioned application are direct and significant. Developer costs of £12,000 to £25,000 per failed submission cover the professional fees associated with preparing, submitting and attempting to salvage applications that do not pass. They do not capture the programme costs of a delayed start on site, the holding costs on a completed project awaiting occupation, or the commercial consequences of a scheme that misses its delivery window.
At a time when development viability is under pressure from construction cost inflation and financing conditions, absorbing the cost of a failed Gateway 2 application is not a minor irritation. For some schemes, it is the difference between viability and withdrawal.
What the Industry Needs to Understand
The BSR's regime is not a tightened version of the old building control process. It is a fundamentally different standard of evidence, applied by a specialist regulator with the technical capacity to scrutinise submissions in depth. Treating it as an administrative hurdle to be cleared at the end of the design process — assembling documents from outputs already produced for other purposes — is the single most reliable way to generate a requisition or a rejection.
The numbers above are not an indictment of the regime. They are an indictment of how the industry has engaged with it. The standard has been set. The question for every project team approaching Gateway 2 is whether their submission is built to meet it.
- Compliance work must begin at RIBA Stage 1, not Stage 4.
- Compliance statements must be written to the specific building, not adapted from templates.
- Duty holder competence evidence must reference the BSR's current standard frameworks.
- A pre-submission review — independent assessment of the draft package before it is lodged — is the most effective way to identify and resolve issues before the BSR does.
The trajectory of the BSR's approval data from late 2023 to the end of 2024 shows the industry learning, slowly, how to meet the new standard. The teams that learn it fastest are the ones that treat compliance as a core discipline, not an afterthought.