Just seven schemes out of 40 applications received last year get green light from regulator.
Less than a quarter of finished high-rise housing projects that have applied for “completion” certificates from the new safety regulator have so far received a decision, it has been revealed. Amid continuing industry concern over the operation of the Building Safety Regulator (BSR), the organisation said just seven out the 40 projects which applied in 2024 for the final building control approval necessary to allow residents to move in have so far received it.
Under the new post-Grenfell system for regulating construction work on housing schemes taller than 18 metres (HRBs), developers or firms carrying out remediation work must seek approval at three distinct “gateway” points.
Firms have already raised concerns about the length of time it has been taking the new Building Safety Regulator to respond to gateway 2 applications, approvals for which are needed to allow construction to start on site. However, buyers and developers are also starting to express fears about delays at the post-construction gateway 3 stage, where a “completion certificate” must be issued before the building can be occupied.
A spokesperson for the Health & Safety Executive, in which the regulator is housed, said that the BSR accepted that nine projects inherited from the collapse of private building control firm AIS had experienced delays at Gateway 3, but that others were “progressing through their 8-week assessment period”
The spokesperson said: “Essentially there are no issues at GW3, taking out the transitional [AIS] cases”.
The spokesperson added that the new funding “will help the timescales on progressing compliant applications” at gateway 2 but that the industry needed to “step up and comply with the process” with better quality applications.