The interesting number in England’s housing statistics isn’t the headline. It’s 5,758.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government published its new-supply indicators on Sept. 24. Starts in the second quarter came to 35,910, up 6% on the quarter and 20% on the year. Rolling 12-month starts reached 136,330, up 15%, against 143,770 completions.
Of those quarterly starts, 5,758 came through the Building Safety Regulator’s gateway process. The previous quarterly peak was 1,206.
The gateway stopped being the bottleneck
Gateway 2 applies to higher-risk buildings, broadly those above 18 metres or seven storeys, and since 2023 it has functioned as a hard stop between planning consent and breaking ground. Developers reported waits running past a year against a statutory target measured in weeks. High-rise residential starts in England effectively stalled while the queue built.
A jump from 1,206 to 5,758 in a single quarter is the queue clearing, not new demand appearing. Which means a meaningful share of the 20% year-on-year growth is schemes that were consented and financed some time ago finally getting a start date. That’s genuinely good news for anyone with a tower sitting in the backlog. It’s also a one-off, and the next few quarters will show whether the regulator can sustain the throughput or whether it just worked off a stock.
Off a very deep base
Starts remain roughly 47% below the second quarter of 2023. A 20% gain on a number that halved is not a return to trend, and completions running ahead of starts over the rolling year means the delivery pipeline is still shrinking even as starts improve.
For contractors the practical read is about sequencing. High-rise residential work released by the gateway arrives with design largely fixed and funding already in place, so it converts to site activity faster than a fresh planning consent does. Expect the tender pressure to show up first in the trades that follow a concrete frame.
What the release doesn’t say
The gov.uk publication is a set of statistical tables rather than a narrative, and the headline quarterly figures circulating in the trade press come from Construction Enquirer’s reading of them. The tables don’t break gateway approvals down by region or by scheme size, so there’s no way to tell from this release whether the throughput improvement is spread across the country or concentrated in London.
Nor does it say anything about remediation, which is the other half of the Building Safety Act workload and the part that competes for the same specialist fire engineering capacity. A regulator clearing new applications faster while a remediation programme runs alongside it is drawing on a pool of qualified people that has not grown fivefold.
Retrofit continues to absorb a large share of English residential capacity: projects like the £57 million Balfron Tower refurbishment in Poplar put 146 existing homes back into use without registering as a single start.