Sean Robinson and Craig Renton of Anstey Horne set out to demystify the Building Safety Regulator's Gateways 2 and 3, the points at which a higher-risk building's design, and then its construction, have to be shown to comply. Anstey Horne runs an in-house fire-engineering team alongside building safety, rights of light, party wall and cost management, and much of what the pair shared was drawn from their own submissions, some of it, they admitted, learned the hard way.

Inside a rejection meeting

Robinson began with a recent case: a client asked, very last-minute, for help attending a BSR rejection meeting. The lessons were sobering. Response times have tightened, an RFI now typically wants a reply in five days, a follow-on in two, and, crucially, an application can be rejected before an RFI is even issued if the evidence simply is not there. The single best defence, he argued, is to provide all the necessary evidence up front and give the Regulator as few reasons to raise a query as possible.

Why applications stall

Renton set out the recurring reasons applications are delayed or rejected, and they were strikingly mundane. The first is poorly organised documents, submissions the Regulator cannot navigate. The fix is unglamorous and effective: a clear portal folder structure, a proper index, sensible file naming, and a document that states plainly what the project is and which parts of the building regulations it engages.

The second is incomplete design information, deferring decisions, submitting designs that are not actually finalised, or papering over gaps with "statements of future intent." Gateway 2, Renton stressed, wants finalised, confirmed designs and real procurement parameters; it is, in effect, the equivalent of RIBA Stage 4, and there are, as his slide put it bluntly, "no excuses."

The third is unsupported "non-worsening" claims, a particular problem on remediation, where up to 73% of existing-building applications, on figures he cited from the FPA, lacked sufficient detail to support them. And the fourth is a cluster of common technical issues: thin evidence for cavity ventilation, incomplete demonstration of thermal performance, and fire-resistance that is asserted rather than clearly designed and evidenced.

The two documents that matter

Running through it all were two documents Renton singled out as the most important for the Registered Building Inspector and the fire engineer: the Building Regulations Compliance Statement and the Fire and Emergency File. The two interlink and are referenced throughout the application, so they must talk to one another, and the Regulator must be led easily to the evidence. A recurring embarrassment, he added, is documents that do not actually relate to the building in question, and the Regulator is always, ultimately, looking for evidence: the scope of works, the parts of the regulations engaged, the design rationale, and the trail of proof right to the end.

"Survey, survey, survey"

Robinson's section on change control produced the talk's sharpest practical point. The instinct on a live project is to solve problems ad hoc, but ad-hoc changes are exactly what make later due diligence hard. The discipline instead is to survey exhaustively, and to design in tolerance from the start. His worked example: you clear Gateway 2, the design is validated, and then a pull-out test fails on site. Change the fixing and you are immediately into a "major change." Design a range of acceptable fixings and tolerances up front, though, and a failed test stays within what was already approved, with the contractor flagging only if the result falls outside the range. Tolerance designed in early is what keeps a site problem from becoming a regulatory one.

Gateway 3 is about what was built

Renton drew the distinction that catches teams out. Gateway 2 proves the design is compliant; Gateway 3 is about justifying that what was actually built complies, and, he warned, what gets built can differ from what was approved, so you have to be able to prove the as-built case on its own terms, through inspections, reports and commissioning photographs. The Regulator, Robinson added, will often have started forming a view before anyone even meets.

Back to basics

The conclusion was a plea for clarity. Adopt a back-to-basics approach; explain the design approach, not just the final outputs; structure submissions so that someone else can quickly understand them and find the evidence; keep everything clear and logical. There were, they noted, encouraging signs of the Regulator shifting to help industry, with the Construction Leadership Council developing guidance on the Fire and Emergency File and the Building Regulations Compliance Statement. But the core message was simpler, and it rhymed with the fire-engineering talk before it: say what you are going to do, do what you say, and prove it.