Gateway Three applications being processed nearly 50% faster but missing info triggers 54% ‘time penalty’ increase
Posted by: electime 14th May 2026
According to data from the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) obtained via a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by subcontractor operations platform Onetrace, Gateway Three applications are now being processed 48% faster than last year. However, if extra information is requested by the regulator, processing times jump by more than six weeks (54%).
Gateway Three applications submitted between April 2024 to 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, this is still more than six weeks longer than the BSR’s eight-week target.
The data also shows that while the BSR is becoming more efficient, a ‘time penalty’ is emerging for incomplete applications. In the earlier April 2024 to March 2025 period, additional information requests had no impact on the speed of application processing. However, from April 2025 to March 2026, applications took 54% longer if the BSR requested additional information to process them, an additional 6.8 extra weeks on average. A delay nearly as long as the BSR’s entire eight-week target.
In the latest twelve-month period, applications not needing additional information were processed in 88.4 days (12.6 weeks) on average. Applications considered incomplete have taken approximately 135.7 days (19.3 weeks), around an extra 47.3 days (6.7 weeks).
The Building Control Authority (BCA) has released Gateway Three guidance to speed up the processing of applications and reduce the need for additional information requests. It states that the most common issues are: incomplete evidence especially with regards to gaps in the fire and structural safety documentation, weak change control records where changes made after Gateway Two were not properly documented or justified, discrepancies between drawings and site reality, and system integration issues.
Greg McClelland, Co-founder and Partner at Onetrace, said: “It must be a huge relief to developers and contractors that it’s starting to take less time to turn around Gateway Three applications, but it’s clear that there’s a huge time penalty if they’re missing any information.
“As the BCA’s guidance shows, 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 Three applications much easier to put together and faster to process.”
The BSR data shows that, to date, the longest application processing time in the last 12 months was 43.3 weeks.
Onetrace is a subcontractor operations and compliance platform designed to capture ‘as-built’ data and streamline the reporting and verification of crucial information regarding the planning, safety, management, and sign-off of construction sites.
