An On the wire story
Developers appear to be trying to beat the clock before the Building Safety Levy starts on 1 October, leaving England’s building-safety gatekeeper with a larger pile of work even as its decision-making speeds up.
The Building Safety Regulator revealed on September 4 that live Gateway 2 applications had climbed to 1,654 by 31 August, more than 100 higher than a month earlier, and pointed to the approaching levy as a likely reason for the rise. Over the same 12-week period, it made 340 decisions, approving 287 applications covering 18,029 residential units.
The regulator’s previous dataset, covering the 12 weeks to 1 August, showed 1,547 live Gateway 2 cases and 349 decisions, with overall approval rates rising from 77% to 82%.
The clearest acceleration is in new higher-risk buildings and conversions. In the latest 12-week window, 63 fresh applications were lodged, up from 53 in the preceding period, while 50 were decided and 46 approved. Those approvals covered 9,362 homes, and the live new-build and conversion queue rose to 147 schemes representing 32,691 units.
Median approval time held at 22 weeks, compared with 43 weeks and a 39% approval rate a year earlier. Even so, that still sits well above the statutory 12-week period highlighted by The Building Safety Act’s independent tracker, which says the late-2025 uplift in determinations was helped by batching applications for specialist assessment.
London remains at the centre of that workload. The latest regulator data shows that about 65% of in-progress new-build applications and roughly 61% of the units involved are in the capital. Thirty-one of the 50 new-build decisions made in the latest period were on London schemes, where the approval rate stood at 90%.
Earlier August reporting by BCIS, based on the previous cut of the data, had also shown the capital carrying the majority of activity, which suggests the regional imbalance has persisted rather than eased.
Inspired by headline at: Construction Enquirer [1]
• This On the wire article was created using Noahwire AI and reviewed by CIBSE Journal’s editorial team
