The Building Safety Regulator (BSR) has introduced new measures to tackle its legacy caseload and keep pace with incoming work, as it seeks to honour its pledge to clear the Gateway 2 backlog by 2026. Latest figures show that since August, 40 high-rise new-build determinations have been issued, leaving 63 cases still to be decided.
A further nine Gateway 2 applications are ready for determination, reducing the number of high-rise schemes awaiting review to 54. Approval rates have risen to 73% nationally and 85% in London, which the BSR attributes in part to revised processes and clearer expectations on applicants.
Central to the regulator’s approach is a new Fast Track Process designed to accelerate compliant schemes from submission to decision. The streamlined route is intended to free up capacity for more complex cases while giving developers greater certainty on timescales.
Despite this progress on new-build approvals, the picture for cladding remediation and wider safety refurbishment is less positive. Open remediation cases have increased from 262 to 283, underlining the scale of work still required to address legacy fire safety defects.
The BSR report notes that, having prioritised the new-build backlog, the regulator is now drawing up a focused plan to apply lessons learned to remediation cases. October nonetheless marked a record month, with 206 determinations made across all categories, and while invalidation rates remain high, the median time to invalidate is just one week, allowing applicants to revise and resubmit quickly.
The remediation effort sits alongside the government’s Remediation Acceleration Plan, announced last year, which aims to ensure that high-rise and mid-rise residential buildings with dangerous cladding are made safe by the end of 2029. The plan’s objectives are to speed up fixes, identify all buildings with unsafe cladding and provide better support for affected residents.
Under the plan, all high-rise buildings of 18 metres or more with unsafe cladding are expected to be fully remediated by the deadline. Mid-rise buildings of 11 metres or more must either be remediated, have a confirmed completion date, or see enforcement action taken against non-compliant landlords.
At the launch of the plan, former deputy prime minister and housing secretary Angela Rayner highlighted the human impact of delays since Grenfell. She said that thousands of people were still living in homes with dangerous cladding and that the pace of remediation had been “far too slow for far too long”.
Rayner described the Remediation Acceleration Plan as a decisive step to make homes safe and hold those responsible to account. She said it was intended to ensure that those charged with making buildings safe deliver the change residents “need and deserve”.
