Gateway 1: fire safety at the planning stage

What is Gateway 1 and when did it start?

Gateway 1 is the planning-stage checkpoint of the Building Safety Act regime, and it is the oldest part of it. Planning Gateway One went live in August 2021, more than two years before Gateways 2 and 3 switched on in October 2023. Since then, planning applications for relevant high-rise residential buildings have had to include a fire statement, with the regulator acting as statutory consultee on fire safety to the local planning authority.

The thinking comes straight from the Hackitt review's recommendation of gateway checkpoints through the life of a project: fire safety is cheapest to fix while the big moves, the site layout, the massing, the cores, are still lines on a drawing.

What does a fire statement cover?

A fire statement is a principles document, not a technical fire strategy. It sets out, at a level of detail appropriate to a planning decision, the fire safety approach for the development: the concepts and standards the design applies, and how the scheme deals with the things a planning authority can actually influence, such as site layout and access for fire and rescue services. The full, evidenced fire safety design comes later, at Gateway 2.

Treat it as a commitment register. Everything the fire statement promises becomes part of the record the same regulator will hold you to when the detailed design arrives.

Who reviews the fire statement?

The regulator reviews it as statutory consultee and advises the local planning authority. At launch in August 2021 that role sat with the Health and Safety Executive; the function now sits with the Building Safety Regulator, which became a standalone public body sponsored by MHCLG on 27 January 2026. The planning authority still makes the planning decision. The consultee's job is to make sure fire safety has a voice in it.

Is Gateway 1 a hard stop like Gateways 2 and 3?

No. Gateways 2 and 3 are hard stops: construction cannot lawfully start without Gateway 2 approval, and occupation before the Gateway 3 completion certificate and registration is a criminal offence. Gateway 1 has no equivalent blocking power. A planning authority can grant permission against the consultee's advice.

That makes it tempting to treat the consultee response as noise. Resist the temptation. The concerns raised at Gateway 1 do not expire; they wait. The same regulator is the building control authority at Gateway 2, and a scheme that shrugged off planning-stage fire comments tends to arrive there with the same problems, now baked into a completed design and far more expensive to unwind. Ignoring Gateway 1 does not avoid the argument. It reschedules it for the point where the regulator can say no.

Why are hospitals and care homes treated differently?

Hospitals and care homes are excluded from the Gateway 1 relevant-building definition even though they qualify as higher-risk buildings at Gateways 2 and 3 during design and construction. The result is an odd gap: a care home scheme gets no statutory fire consultee at planning, then meets full BSR scrutiny at Gateway 2.

For teams delivering those buildings the practical answer is to run the planning-stage fire review anyway, internally, as if the consultee were in the room. The Gateway 2 reviewer will not care that nobody was formally required to look earlier.

How do Gateway 1 decisions echo through the rest of the regime?

The fire safety commitments made at planning become the baseline for everything that follows. At Gateway 2 the BSR expects a fully resolved, coordinated design; a fire strategy that quietly departs from the fire statement invites questions. After Gateway 2, major changes need BSR approval before the affected work can proceed, so a planning-stage decision that later proves wrong is not corrected with a drawing revision, it is corrected through formal change control.

The second staircase mandate shows the stakes: from 30 September 2026, all new residential buildings in England above 18 metres require a second staircase. Schemes that read the direction of travel at planning designed for it; schemes that did not have faced redesign mid-process. Gateway 1 is where those calls get made cheaply. Every later stage of the regime just raises the price.