The UK’s building control approval process is under more pressure than at any point in its history. Seven in ten completed assessments by the Building Safety Regulator are being refused, and of those refusals, nearly six in ten are subject to enforcement action. The average time from submission to decision now stretches well beyond 18 weeks. For housing providers managing higher-risk buildings, the cost of checking a single submission manually runs to over £100,000 in professional resource time before a single application fee is paid.
At the same time, the regulator itself has just undergone the most significant structural change since the Building Safety Act came into force. The BSR is now an independent public body, answerable directly to government, with a stronger mandate and a faster approval process. A regulator that moves more quickly does not make life easier for applicants. Instead, it means gaps in submissions are identified sooner, and the consequences of those gaps arrive faster.
This is the environment that AI-assisted compliance tools were built for. Tools like Truelens exist because the old way of doing this is no longer fit for what the system now demands. Truelens checks every word of a construction submission against the relevant Building Regulations and BSR requirements, identifies gaps and inconsistencies, and produces a structured report in minutes. This is how the responsible use of AI is helping the industry.
The problem the system has not solved
The Building Safety Act did not create new problems. It made existing ones impossible to ignore. The compliance checking process (the work that happens before a submission reaches the regulator) has always been manual, sequential, and dependent on individual expertise applied under time pressure across thousands of pages of technical documentation. The result has always been variable. What has changed is that the consequences of variability are now measured in enforcement action, criminal liability, and programme delays that compound across an entire building portfolio.
READ MORE: Cuckooing Is About to Become A Crime: What Providers Need to Do Next
The BSR has made significant operational progress. Approval rates rose to 67% in Q1 2026 under its new batching process, and median decision times have fallen sharply from where they were twelve months ago. But faster processing does not reduce the burden on applicants. A regulator that moves more quickly through applications is one that identifies gaps more quickly too. The organisations whose submissions are complete and consistent benefit from that speed.
The submission quality problem is structural. It will not resolve itself through effort alone, because the process producing the submissions has not changed. Manual checking by experienced professionals, however diligent, cannot guarantee word-level consistency across thousands of pages of technical documentation against hundreds of regulatory requirements. That is not a failure of expertise. It is the inherent limitation of a human process applied to a task of this scale and complexity.
This is what reform actually looks like
The Construction Leadership Council, the Building Safety Alliance, the Building Control Independent Panel, and individual compliance practitioners across the sector have all converged on the same conclusion: the path to a more efficient, more reliable building control process runs through digital standardisation. Not as a long-term aspiration. As an operating requirement, now.
Gareth Grimes, Technical Director at Clarke Banks, set this out directly in his analysis of the Gateway process. The current system is characterised by delay, poor submission quality, and a culture of submit-and-wait that benefits nobody. His proposed solution, a shift toward AI-assisted pre-submission checking that flags missing data, identifies inconsistencies, and benchmarks documentation against regulatory requirements before it reaches the regulator, is precisely the model Truelens delivers. Clarke Banks uses Truelens because, as practitioners who understand both the regulatory environment and the cost of failure within it, they concluded that the old process is no longer adequate for the environment it now operates in.
CAST Consultancy reached the same conclusion. Their team, led by COO Lilly Gallafent, identified that even thorough manual checking cannot guarantee the depth and consistency of review that the BSA now requires, and that experienced reviewers, under time pressure, cannot apply equal rigour to every section of a complex multi-thousand-page submission. Truelens checks every word with equal depth, regardless of which Approved Document it falls under or how straightforward a section appears. The professional then reviews what it finds and applies their expertise accordingly. The judgement remains human, but the thoroughness of the check no longer depends on one.
What the data shows it delivers
The outcomes are consistent across Truelens’ customer base. A typical higher-risk building submission involves 12,500 pages of documentation. Manual checking at an average of 7.5 minutes per page costs £101,563 in professional resource time before the application fee and any consultant overhead. Truelens reduces average checking time to 2 minutes per page. The total cost, including the platform and human judgement, is £31,458. That is a saving of over £70,000 on a single submission, and a return of £16 for every £1 spent.
The financial case, significant as it is, understates the actual value. The real cost of a failed submission is not the direct checking expenditure. It is the days of processing time that begins again from the point of refusal. It is the enforcement exposure, 59% of refused assessments carry enforcement risk, with personal criminal liability for dutyholders. And it is the compounding effect across a portfolio where multiple buildings are moving through the BSR process simultaneously.
Beyond compliance checking: the full submission platform
Truelens began as an AI compliance checking tool. Now it is becoming a complete Building Control submission platform, and that evolution is directly shaped by what the system needs.
AI compliance checking is the foundation. But a submission is not just a document. It is a process. And the organisations managing that process today are doing so across email, spreadsheets, and disconnected data environments, with no shared visibility of where each document stands and no structured path from design intent to regulator sign-off.
Truelens is introducing submission workflow management: a structured, project-specific path that tracks every document through the compliance process from first upload to Gateway submission. Every decision is logged and timestamped, creating an audit trail that is fully defensible at Gateway and that directly supports the Golden Thread obligation. The legal requirement to maintain a continuous, accurate, change-audited digital record of safety-critical information from design through to occupation is not a future ambition. It has been in force since 2023.
The platform is also introducing the first defined document content standard for a Building Control submission: a structured checklist of what should be in a Gateway 2 package, mapped to the relevant regulatory requirements, so that completeness is assessed against a defined baseline rather than individual professional judgement. This is the gap that causes 78% of assessed applications to require further information from the regulator. It is the gap Truelens is built to close.
The decision in front of you
Every housing provider managing higher-risk buildings faces the same calculation. The BSR is faster, more demanding, and independently accountable. The Golden Thread is a live legal obligation. The refusal rate remains at 73%. And the organisations that build better compliance processes now will enter the next phase of this regime with a structural advantage over those that don’t.
The case for a different approach is no longer theoretical. CAST Consultancy and Clarke Banks, two of the most experienced compliance-focused organisations in the UK, are using Truelens because they have done the arithmetic and reached the same conclusion: the cost of not changing the process is higher than the cost of changing it.
At £16 return for every £1 spent, the financial case is not complicated. At over 18 weeks lost to a failed submission, neither is the programme case. And for a dutyholder carrying personal liability for what goes to the regulator, the risk case barely needs stating.
Truelens gives housing providers a fundamentally better process for meeting an obligation that is not going away. More thorough, faster, and more defensible.
Could we please have the following quotes highlighted and placed instead of photos?
“A typical higher-risk building submission involves 12,500 pages of documentation. Manual checking costs £101,563 in professional resource time. TrueLens reduces that total cost to £31,458, a saving of over £70,000 and a return of £16 for every £1 spent.”
“The submission quality problem is structural. It will not resolve itself through effort alone, because the process producing the submissions has not changed. Manual checking by experienced professionals, however diligent, cannot guarantee word-level consistency across thousands of pages of technical documentation against hundreds of regulatory requirements”
