Quintain says it has been waiting nine months to get safety sign-off on Wembley Park job

Wembley Park developer Quintain has said it has been waiting nine months for safety sign-off on one of its schemes at the site.

The firm told Building it has been waiting for more than 37 weeks to get gateway 2 sign-off on part of a 487 homes scheme called NE02 which is being built by Sisk.

Under new rules introduced following the Grenfell Tower fire nearly eight years ago, three new safety checks, known as “gateways”, for all new high-risk buildings – defined as 18 metres or at least seven storeys tall – have to be signed off by the Building Safety Regulator (BSR).

The first check is before planning consent, a second one before construction can start, known as gateway 2, and then a final check at delivery just before the building can be occupied, called gateway 3.

The BSR is obliged to decide remediation projects at gateway 2 within eight weeks and new-build schemes at the same phase in 12.

But the issue of the regulator having enough and competent inspectors has meant these timescales are not being met with schemes weeks and months behind schedule.

Matt Voyce, executive director of construction for Quintain, which has been developing the Wembley Park site since 2002, told Building: “We, like many of our peers, are frustrated with the lack of feedback and disappointingly we have experienced periods of up to seven weeks between any communication at all from the BSR despite our ongoing efforts to communicate and all our requests for a meeting to discuss our applications are ignored.

“Our residential development of 487 homes at Wembley Park is nearing completion with the first two of four blocks handed over but we have no timeline for approval of our gateway 2 application after 37 weeks or gateway 3 application after 11 weeks.”

He added: “We fully expect that our whole development will be complete, without permission to occupy, incurring significant costs and keeping hundreds of market rate and affordable homes off the market.

“We have completed two of the four blocks in our NE02 project which total 185 apartments of which 104 are affordable or shared ownership.”

The approved building control inspector Quintain was using on the scheme went into liquidation last June causing the job to be stalled for several weeks. Quintain restarted after getting the green light from the BSR and the proviso it would get retrospective gateway 2 sign-off – which it is still waiting for.

Quintain’s problems underline growing industry concern about the problem which last week saw the government announce an extra £2m to clear up the logjam.

Earlier this month, McLaren suggested private developers could help fund an initiative to speed up decisions at the gateway 2 stage.

Chief executive Paul Heather said: “One way to maintain viability on larger schemes with multi-million pound investment could be to introduce a building safety pre-application procedure akin to the pre-application process in the planning system. These pre-apps would be funded by the developers, helping the Building Safety Regulator to resource the process.”

Others raising concerns have included the trade body for piling specialists which has warned its members are deferring investment decisions while others are looking at lay-offs.

Andrew Moore, head of operations, planning and building control at the BSR, told Building it was deploying increasing resources to tackle delays, claiming that wait times for applicants for building control approval were falling.

But he admitted the BSR was “not there yet” on meeting its statutory targets.

Last week, the development arm of Clarion Housing Group took the step of announcing it had been granted gateway 2 approval for a 400-plus homes scheme in Leeds called Dyecoats.

The £100m scheme for Latimer will be built by Northern Irish contractor Graham and Richard Cook, chief development officer at Clarion Housing Group, admitted: “Successfully securing BSR approval combined with the appointment of Graham are significant milestones for Latimer.”