The Gateway 2 queue is 23 weeks. Can AI help an application through first time?
A Gateway 2 application is a programme risk before it is anything else. Until the Building Safety Regulator approves it, work on a higher-risk building does not start, and every week in the queue is float, finance and preliminaries the job has to carry. AI cannot make the regulator faster. What it can do is make sure the application that goes in is complete, consistent and easy to assess, which is the only part of the wait the applicant controls.
Part 1 | The queue
How long is the Gateway 2 queue right now?
Longer than the rules intend, and filling faster than it empties. Building Safety Regulator figures for September, reported by Construction Enquirer on 8 October, put the Gateway 2 caseload at 1,706 applications, with schemes covering more than 40,000 homes waiting for a decision. New build submissions jumped to 64 in September from 34 in August and 17 in July, as developers applied before the building safety levy started on 1 October. New build applications are arriving about twice as fast as the regulator is deciding them.
There is good news in the same figures. The regulator approved 55 of its 57 new build decisions over the latest twelve weeks, it is adding inspectors, and it says it will now reject an application only where there is no realistic prospect of approval in a reasonable time. A well-prepared application gets through. The cost is in how long it sits, and in the rounds of questions a weaker one attracts.
Part 1 | Why they stall
Why do Gateway 2 applications stall?
Mostly because of the information, not the design. The regulator's own guidance on managing building control approval applications sets out what gets an application rejected and what it warns against, and most of it is about what was submitted rather than what is being built.
Most of what the regulator warns about can be caught before submission
| What the GOV.UK guidance warns about | What it looks like in the pack | Can a pre-submission check catch it? |
|---|---|---|
| Required information missing | A plan, statement or drawing simply absent | Yes, against the published list |
| Not enough detail to show compliance | Statements that assert compliance rather than explain it | Partly: it can flag vague wording, the fix is engineering |
| No effective strategy for managing compliance | Generic control plans with nothing specific to the building | Partly: it can flag boilerplate and missing specifics |
| Work submitted under the wrong category | Existing building work filed as A when it is B, or the reverse | It can flag the question, a person decides |
| Assumptions about an existing building, which must be evidenced | Assumed construction with no survey or test behind it | Yes: assumptions with no evidence reference |
| Proposed work would not comply | A design that does not meet the regulations | No. That is for the design team and the regulator |
Some failures are almost clerical. The guidance on preparing the application, updated on 1 October, warns that uploading a construction phase plan where a construction control plan belongs can get an application rejected, and it sets rules for file formats and file names. Those are exactly the mistakes a tired team makes at eleven at night before a submission deadline, and exactly the ones a machine checks without getting tired.
Part 2 | The check
What can AI check before an application goes in?
Everything that can be compared against something else. A Gateway 2 pack is a set of documents that have to agree: the form, the drawings, the building regulations compliance statement, the fire and emergency file, the construction control plan, the change control plan, the mandatory occurrence reporting plan and the competence declaration. A check built on a current language model can read the whole set and report:
- Completeness. Every item on the GOV.UK list for this type of work is present, in the right slot.
- Consistency. Storey counts, heights, unit numbers, building names and uses agree across the form, the fire strategy and the drawings. The fire strategy that says fourteen storeys while the sections show fifteen is found before the regulator finds it.
- Cross-references. Every drawing a statement relies on is in the reference file, at the revision quoted.
- Assumptions. Every assumption about an existing building is listed, with the survey or test that supports it, or a flag that nothing does.
- Specifics. Control plans that read like they could belong to any building are flagged for the team to make particular.
- File hygiene. Formats, sizes and names that meet the published rules.
The models that do this reading improved again at the end of September. Anthropic's Sonnet 5.5 and OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol both shipped that week at the same mid-tier price, and OpenAI's own figures claim better answers on complex PDFs with tables and fine print. Treat those as vendor claims to test on your own documents, with the outputs checked, as set out in uploading construction documents to AI safely.
Part 2 | The limits
Where must the checking stop?
At anything that is a judgement about the building. Whether the design complies, whether the fire strategy is right, whether the people are competent: those belong to the principal designer, the fire engineer, the client who signs the competence declaration and, in the end, the regulator. This article is about the paperwork, not fire or building safety advice, and a check that strays into giving opinions on compliance has gone wrong. The reasoning is set out in AI cannot be the dutyholder.
The professional bodies are heading the same way. RICS ran a session on digital twins, the golden thread and Gateway 3 at UK Construction Week on 30 September, and where a surveyor relies on AI output with material impact, the RICS standard on responsible AI use requires a written, named decision on whether that output can be relied on. The CIOB and i3PT golden thread survey in 2020 found 85 per cent of built environment professionals thought a digital golden thread would improve decisions and make accountability clearer. The information discipline that gets an application through Gateway 2 is the same one Gateway 3 will test, which is why we wrote about Gateway 3 readiness separately.
Part 3 | Where to start
How would a contractor or developer set this up?
As a step in the submission process, not a new system. Turn the GOV.UK list into a checklist for each type of work you apply for. Keep the application set in one controlled place, a SharePoint library or your common data environment, so the check reads the same documents the team is editing. Run the check, resolve every flag, run it again, and file the final report with the submission as part of the record.
Some teams are already moving earlier. Construction Enquirer reported on 1 October that Graham secured final Gateway 2 approvals across all 29 blocks of the Fallowfield student scheme, having made its first application several months before planning approval. Starting early and arriving complete are the two things an applicant controls.
We set this up as a document automation project inside your own Microsoft tenant, often alongside a tidy SharePoint and CDE setup. We also do this for engineering firms, including façade engineers, preparing the technical content that goes into a pack. If you have an application going in this quarter, book a call and we will look at the pack with you.
Sources
Which sources is this article built on?
Every figure above resolves to one of these, each read at source before publication.
- Construction Enquirer, Gateway 2 backlog swells again as developers race to beat levy, 8 October 2026, reporting Building Safety Regulator figures
- Construction Enquirer, Graham lands final Gateway 2 approvals at £530m Fallowfield, 1 October 2026
- GOV.UK, Managing building control approval applications for higher-risk buildings, updated 1 October 2026
- GOV.UK, Preparing information for a building control approval application, updated 1 October 2026
- RICS at UK Construction Week Birmingham 2026, 8 September 2026, and RICS, first standard on responsible AI use now in effect
- CIOB, CIOB and i3PT launch Golden Thread report
- OpenAI, Introducing GPT-6.1 Sol, 29 September 2026, and Anthropic, Introducing Claude Sonnet 5.5, 28 September 2026
Photograph by Catia Climovich on Unsplash, used under the Unsplash Licence.