Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps (a) her Department and (b) the Building Safety Regulator is taking to reduce decision times by the regulator for approving multi-storey residential blocks.

MHCLG and the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) both recognise the impact of Gateway delays on the construction pipeline of high-rise projects and are taking action to address the current challenges.

The Department is working closely with the BSR to improve processing times and has already taken several actions. As a new function, the BSR has needed to refine and improve its processes. We have provided funding to the BSR to recruit an extra 30 frontline staff to bolster its capacity. On 14 May, the BSR also launched a campaign to directly recruit Registered Building Inspectors (RBIs) with significant further recruitment planned in June 2025. The impact of these mitigations will scale up in the coming months as the BSR continues to clear applications.

MHCLG and the BSR are also reviewing better ways to access specialist advice on multi-disciplinary teams (MDTs) which assess applications to enable faster assessment times.

Whilst the BSR and MHCLG are exploring all possible opportunities to strengthen the new Gateway process and guidance to industry, it is important to recognise that a significant volume of applications continue to be invalidated or rejected for not meeting the legislative requirements. These are buildings that, had they been constructed, might have placed residents at risk and/or living in housing that did not meet long-standing requirements. It is also important to note that additional information requests for missing details in applications can add between at least 4-6 weeks onto the process. In recognition of this, the BSR issued new guidance in March 2025 to assist applications in preparing high quality applications.