Planning Gateway One – a year on

Peter Baker, Chief Inspector of Buildings, looks back at the first year of Planning Gateway One for high-rise buildings:

It’s been just over a year since HSE became a statutory consultee for planning applications for high-rise residential buildings.

Planning Gateway One (PGO) was the first step in transforming the regulatory framework for building safety in England following the Grenfell Tower tragedy. PGO aims to ensure that applicants consider fire safety issues at the earliest possible stage in the development process, and that thinking on fire safety is fully integrated into development schemes.

In the first year of PGO, HSE received just over 1,300 consultation requests from local planning authorities on planning applications for developments that include a relevant building. As well as new planning applications involving high-rise residential buildings, around 30% of these cases included resubmissions following HSE’s advice to planning authorities. A further 30% were considered to be out of scope of the new regime, or the case related to an application that pre-dated the start of PGO.

The number of cases referred to PGO is encouraging and provides some confidence that HSE is being consulted on planning applications for relevant buildings, and that the new, more stringent regime for higher risk buildings is having an impact at the planning stage of developments.

HSE raised fire safety concerns related to land use planning in over half of the cases, ranging from issues that could be easily rectified with straightforward modifications to building layout and access, to the need for significant changes, including additional firefighting shafts, the location of fire mains, fire appliance accessibility, escape route protection, and preventing fire spread to other buildings.

We worked with local planning authorities to ensure that our concerns were addressed and rectified prior to consent. In a small number of cases, HSE advised the local authority against granting planning permission.

I’m delighted to see that there are early signs that PGO is driving a change in the behaviour of developers and designers, and that HSE has been able to have a positive influence on the fire safety of higher-risk buildings early in the design process.

There is more to do to raise industry’s awareness of PGO and the content of fire statements, and we will be sharing the learning from the first year of PGO with developers and local planning authorities to improve fire safety outcomes.

In the meantime, I would encourage clients, developers and design teams to use our free fire safety and planning pre-application service before you submit your planning application, for further advice on fire safety design relevant to land use planning.

Take-up of our free advice service is increasing and already making a difference to applicants’ plans and the fire safety of high-rise buildings in England.

Content provided by the Health and Safety Executive.