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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, on average how many hours are spent reviewing (a) a successful and (b) an unsuccessful application for Gateway 2 approval from the Building Safety Regulator.

The Building Safety Regulator’s (BSR) handling time for each application is dependent on a range of factors, primarily the quality of the application and the additional information submitted by the applicant. As can be seen in the table below, the average handling time by hour varies.

BSR officials have provided the table below which demonstrates the average number of days taken to approve a Gateway 2 (GW2) application.

Information on the length of documents submitted as part of applications is not something the BSR actively collects data for. The length and number of documents required to support a GW2 application varies, and there is no correlation between page length and achievement of a GW2 determination as the size and complexity of projects varies considerably.

The BSR is actively supporting the Construction Leadership Council to develop and publish a further suite of industry guidance on the statutory documents accompanying building control approval applications, staged approvals for single tower HRBs and construction phase and gateway three (completion certificate stage). This is expected in November.

The BSR has also published four new pieces of guidance, including:

• Building control approval for higher-risk buildings - GOV.UK
• Making changes to a higher-risk building project - GOV.UK
• Preparing information for a building control approval application - GOV.UK
• Applying for a completion certificate - GOV.UK