Knowledge / Workflows
Gateway 2 readiness review
Checking a higher-risk building application for contradictions and gaps across the fire strategy, structural and design information before submission to the regulator.
Under the Building Safety Act 2022, a higher-risk building in England (broadly, a residential building of at least 18 metres or seven storeys, or a hospital or care home, during design and construction) needs the Building Safety Regulator's approval at Gateway 2 before construction begins. The application has to show how the design meets the building regulations, through, among other things, the design information, the compliance statement, the fire and emergency file, the construction and change control plans and the competence declarations. Gateway 2 readiness is whether that set is complete and agrees with itself. Today the design manager compiles it, checks it by reading, and finds gaps late, when the regulator's question lands on a contradiction. Structured knowledge lets the team find the contradictions and gaps before submission, and keeps the design manager and principal designer on the decisions.
What the workflow involves today
Agree the application contents with the principal designer and list the documents each part will draw on.
Collect the current issue of every document from each consultant and confirm the revisions match across the set.
Read the fire strategy against the architectural, structural and services drawings and note where they disagree.
Check that every wall type, floor build-up and external wall construction has a stated fire resistance in the specification and on the drawings.
Review the construction control plan and the change control plan against the programme and the procurement route.
Compile the competence declarations and check each named person and organisation is still the one on the project.
Submit, then answer the regulator's questions by going back through the set to find which document each one traces to.
Where generic AI tools fail
A general-purpose tool can produce a checklist for a Gateway 2 application, and it can summarise each document put in front of it. It cannot check the fire strategy against the structural general arrangements and the model, because those are three records of the same building in three formats and the tool holds none of the relationships between them. A summary of each document with a note that the set looks complete is not a readiness review, and a checklist with ticks against document titles does not tell you that a wall type on drawing 9001 has no fire resistance stated anywhere in the specification.
The second failure is traceability. A regulator's question traces to a document, a revision and a paragraph, and the value of a readiness review is knowing in advance which document would answer which question and whether that document agrees with its neighbours. A generic tool cannot produce that map because it does not know the application set as a set. What it produces reads well, with the right vocabulary, and gives the design manager a feeling of readiness that the first request for further information removes. The team then does the cross-reading by hand, after submission, on a timetable it does not control.
What changes with structured knowledge
When the application set is structured knowledge, the requirement in the strategy, the wall that carries it, the drawing that shows it, the specification clause that defines it and the model object that represents it are already connected, so the review reads across all of them rather than through each consultant's folder in turn.
The design manager receives a register of contradictions and gaps: a requirement in the strategy with no drawing showing it, a drawing revision newer than the one the strategy references, a wall type with no fire resistance stated in the specification, a model object whose rating disagrees with the sheet. Each entry carries its sources and their revisions. Alongside it is a map of which document, at which revision, answers each part of the application.
The design manager and principal designer decide what to fix, what to explain and what to leave, and issue the changes with the references attached. The review does not make the application compliant and does not predict the regulator's decision; it puts the professionals in a position to defend what they submit. The same connected record is where the golden thread for the building can be held from the outset, so the effort is not spent twice.
We onboard a focused slice of your project data, configure the ingestion paths, extract a structured context graph, and build a workflow against the resulting structured knowledge layer.
Related to
The review reads the fire strategy documents, the construction drawings from every discipline and the IFC and BIM models as one application set, together with the specifications and the plans the application requires. The fire strategy consistency check is the part of it that concerns compartmentation and escape, and the drawing coordination review is the part that concerns the sheets agreeing with each other.
Does it cover the structural and services information as well as fire?
Which document systems does it work with?
Can we see it on an application we are preparing?