Gateway 3 applications are being processed 48% faster than last year, while missing information can lead to a six-week delay.
Data from the Building Safety Regulator (BSR), obtained via a Freedom of Information request filed by Onetrace, shows that applications submitted between April 2024 and the end of March 2025 took on average 27.5 weeks to process.
In the following 12-month period, this dropped to just 14.3 weeks, a 48% improvement.
However, it seems a ‘time penalty’ is emerging for incomplete applications. In the period from April 2024 to March 2025, additional information requests had no impact on the speed of application processing. Yet, from April 2025 to March 2026, applications took 54% longer if the BSR requested additional information to process them: 6.8 extra weeks on average.
In its related guidance, the Building Safety Regulator describes Gateway 3 as a “stop/go point” before a higher-risk building can be occupied, and that “applications must demonstrate how the building work complies with building regulations requirements to provide assurance that buildings are safe to occupy”.
Golden thread
Onetrace co-founder and partner Greg McClelland said the findings represent good and bad news for the sector. “It must be a huge relief to developers and contractors that it’s starting to take less time to turn around Gateway 3 applications, but it’s clear that there’s a huge time penalty if they’re missing any information.”
He continued: “The industry as a whole needs to be more methodical and get used to recording compliance and ‘as-built’ information in a much more structured way and recording the information properly. That way, the golden thread information is recorded as a matter of course, making Gateway 3 applications much easier to put together and faster to process.”
