A House of Lords Committee report has called for a changes to the ‘Gateway 2’ approval process for High Risk Buildings, in response to the high levels of delays being currently faced getting Building Safety Regulator approval by the construction industry. The committee recommended a change to increasing approval stages to allow construction to progress while detailed design work continues. Dame Judith Hackitt, who gave evidence to the Lords inquiry, supported the idea of further approval stages.

Under the proposed changes, contractors would need to ‘lock down’ critical fire and structural features early, while the Regulator would allow secondary, non-critical elements to progress in parallel. The report says it would restore consistency in design and build procurement, and avoid unnecessary redesign costs that cause impacts throughout supply chains.

The Committee also demanded that local authorities rather than Building Safety Regulator teams take over non-safety critical refurbishment work in high-rise buildings such as internal bathroom or kitchen upgrades. These “low-risk, low-value” works were obstructing critical cladding and structural cases in the queue for approvals, said the Lords Committee, and submissions should be reclassified so that only Category A safety-critical items are required to have BSR approval.

While welcoming the Building Safety Regulator’s introduction as a “necessary step,” to improve building procurement, Committee chair Baroness Taylor of Bolton acknowledged the “anxiety and frustration that residents and companies have experienced” from the delays to BSR approvals.

She said the “scale of the delays caused by the BSR has stretched far beyond the regulator’s statutory timelines for building control decisions. This is unacceptable.”

Baroness Taylor concluded: “We expect to see further action from the Government and the BSR to ensure that construction projects in high-rise buildings can be brought forward more quickly, without compromising on vital safety improvements.”

The Regulator was urged to publish clear guidance on what must be approved pre-construction and what can follow as staged releases. The report also pushed for scrutiny of low-risk refurbishment work in towers to be handed back to councils.

But the Lords also warned that skills shortages of registered building inspectors and fire engineers continued to impact approvals. In addition, developers were reportedly seeing contradictory decisions from different BSR teams on identical design submissions.