What happened

Construction Enquirer reported this week that the Building Safety Regulator's Gateway 2 caseload grew again in September, climbing by 34 applications to 1,706, as developers rushed to submit schemes before the Building Safety Levy took effect on 1 October. New build submissions nearly doubled month on month, with 64 new applications in September compared with 34 in August and 17 in July. Schemes covering more than 40,000 homes are now awaiting a decision, and new applications are arriving roughly twice as fast as the regulator can clear them.

The regulator has responded by adding 25 staff to its internal regulatory team over the past four months, with further recruitment planned over the next six to 12 months. Integrated building inspector capacity, the specialist assessors who sign off high-rise and complex schemes, is forecast to rise from 22.4 full-time equivalent posts at the end of September to 34 by December. Separately, Construction News reported that the regulator has eased its stance on rejecting applications outright, instead working with developers to fix problem submissions rather than sending them back to the queue. The regulator approved 55 of its 57 new build decisions over the latest 12-week period, though the median approval time edged up from 22 to 23 weeks.

Why it matters

The levy deadline has done what two years of regulatory pressure had not quite managed: it has concentrated developer behaviour into a short window, and the backlog is the visible result. For a housing market that was already relying on a faster Gateway 2 process to unlock the stalled starts reported over the summer, a growing queue is a genuine drag, even as the regulator gets better at approving what reaches the front of it. The gap between submission rate and clearance rate is the number to watch: until that closes, schemes will keep queuing behind this year's rush.

What it means for careers and hiring

This is a hiring signal in two directions. First, inside the regulator itself: the jump from 22.4 to a planned 34 inspector posts by December is a concrete, funded expansion of a very specific skill set, fire engineering, building control and higher-risk building assessment, and it is recruiting now. Second, on the developer and consultant side, firms with live schemes in the queue need people who can manage a Gateway 2 submission end to end: building control consultants, fire engineers and planning-adjacent QSs who understand what the regulator is actually asking for are in short supply and will stay that way while the backlog clears. If you are weighing a move into building safety compliance, this is one of the few corners of the market where demand is visibly outstripping the people available to do the work.