Gateway 2 Requirements: Evidence Subcontractors Need

The email usually arrives from the main contractor's design manager, and it is rarely small. The project is a higher-risk building, the building control application is going to the Building Safety Regulator, and your package — the facade, the M&E, the fire-stopping — is on the critical path of that submission. Attached is a schedule of information they need from you. The deadline is not negotiable, because until Gateway 2 is passed, nobody builds anything.

What's Actually Being Asked

Gateway 2 is the point, introduced by the Building Safety Act, at which higher-risk building work — broadly, buildings at least 18 metres or seven storeys with two or more residential units — must receive building control approval from the Building Safety Regulator before construction begins. It is a hard stop, not a formality: the BSR can ask questions, request more information, and refuse. Applications are expected to demonstrate how the design complies with building regulations — not in outline, but in enough detail that the regulator can follow the reasoning.

For the client and principal contractor, that means a full plans application with supporting documents: how compliance is achieved, how change will be controlled during construction, and how competence duties are met. For a specialist subcontractor, it means the parts of that story that only you can tell — your design details, your products, your people — flow up into someone else's application, on someone else's timetable.

The Evidence That Answers It

What a subcontractor is typically asked to contribute comes down to three families of records — the same three demands that run through everything post-BSA:

• Design and product evidence. Your detailed design for the package, the products and systems in it, and the certification behind them — test evidence, declarations of performance, third-party certificates. If a detail deviates from the tested configuration, expect to explain the justification.
• Competence evidence. The Act's competence duties apply to organisations and individuals doing design and building work. Expect to show that the people designing and installing your package are competent for it — qualifications, certification schemes, relevant experience — and that your organisation has the capability to deliver it.
• Compliance narrative. How your package achieves compliance where it matters most — fire performance, structural fixings, interfaces with adjacent packages — written so a reviewer who was not in your design meetings can follow the decisions.

Why the Spreadsheet Version Fails

Most specialist contractors hold all of this — somewhere. The test certificates are in a supplier's email. The design justification is in the heads of two engineers and a meeting minute nobody can find. The competence records are a training matrix that was accurate the day it was made. Assembling a Gateway 2 contribution from that landscape is archaeology: days of digging, and the result is a snapshot that starts going stale immediately — which matters, because Gateway 2 is not the end. Change control during construction and the golden thread run on the same records, all the way to handover.

Keeping It Provable

The pattern that works is to stop treating the submission as a document to assemble and start treating the project as a record you keep. If design decisions, product evidence, competence records and installation evidence are captured as the work happens — each one attached to the part of the building it belongs to — then a Gateway 2 information request stops being a project of its own. You are exporting what you already hold, not reconstructing what you once knew.

The Monday Checklist

1. List the buildings in your current pipeline that meet the higher-risk threshold — that's where Gateway 2 will reach you.
2. For each live HRB package, identify who holds your design justifications today — files, inboxes, or people.
3. Pull the test and product certification for your primary system into one register, with dates and scope noted.
4. Check your competence records against the people actually named on the job — not the company-wide matrix.
5. Agree with the main contractor now what they'll need from you and when — not when the schedule arrives.
6. Decide where change decisions during construction will be recorded, because the BSR's change-control expectations don't pause after approval.

Where BrieXO Fits

BrieXO's FIELD bundle keeps site records, photo evidence, competence records and decisions in one living record, anchored to the building — so the evidence a Gateway 2 request asks for accumulates as you work instead of being assembled under deadline. It supports your dutyholder duties; it doesn't discharge them. See how it maps to the Act on our Building Safety Act compliance software page.

Related reading:the full gateway process, golden thread digital requirements, and what facade management software must prove.