Higher-Risk
Buildings (BSR)
The Service
Refurbishment inside a higher-risk building. Gateway 2 to completion.
Since October 2023 any building in England of 18 metres or seven storeys with two or more homes is a higher-risk building under the Building Safety Act. Refurbishing a flat inside one is no longer a matter of appointing a builder and telling the managing agent. Works that touch structure, fire compartmentation, external walls or the building's services need Building Control Approval from the Building Safety Regulator before a single wall comes down — and nothing starts until the BSR says so.
Most contractors have never taken a project through Gateway 2. Melner has — more than once. We know what the application has to contain, what the Regulator's requests for information look like, how long the standstill periods run, and how to keep a programme alive while they do.
The work itself is the same craftsmanship we bring to any prime London refurbishment. What changes is the paperwork, the discipline and the sequence. Every fire-stopping product needs test evidence. Every penetration through a compartment wall is recorded. Every change to the approved design is assessed before it is built, and notified where it must be. The golden thread of information is kept from the first drawing to the handover file.
We work alongside your architect, principal designer and building safety adviser — or introduce the ones we have taken through this process before — and take on the Principal Contractor duties under Part 2A of the Building Regulations for the construction phase.
In a higher-risk building the regulator sits between you and the start date. The contractor's job is to make sure nothing in the application, the evidence or the change log gives them a reason to say no.
What makes it different
The Building Safety Act sets the sequence. We work inside it.
Gateway 2 Applications
Building Control Approval before works start. We work with the principal designer on the application pack — construction control plan, change control plan, mandatory occurrence reporting plan, competence declarations, fire and emergency file — so it is validated first time.
Regulator Requests for Information
The BSR asks questions, in writing, with deadlines. We have drafted the answers on live projects — fire-stopping test-evidence indexes, external-wall penetration schedules, Regulation 7(2) statements, Part L and H1 compliance statements — in the form the Regulator accepts.
Change Control
Storage over a bathroom, a moved riser, a different fan-coil grille: some changes are recordable, some are notifiable with a standstill period, and getting it wrong stops the job. We assess every change against the approved design before it is priced or built.
Fire Compartmentation & Evidence
Products with test evidence, installed to the tested detail, photographed before they are covered. Compartment lines, penetrations and cavity barriers recorded so the evidence exists when the Regulator or the fire engineer asks for it.
Regulator Inspections & Hold Points
Commencement, structural, pre-plaster, completion. Site kept ready for the registered building inspector at every hold point, with the records to hand, so an inspection never becomes a delay.
Working Within the Building
A higher-risk building is also an occupied one — freeholder, managing agent, fire strategy, evacuation plan, neighbours. Our mansion-block logistics apply in full, with the added obligation that nothing we do compromises the building's fire safety while we are there.
Experience
Taken through the process, not read about it.
At Butlers Wharf, a full apartment refurbishment inside the registered higher-risk riverside building in SE1 has just completed — taken through Building Control Approval, delivered under Melner's Principal Contractor duties with the regulator's hold-point inspections, and handed over with the fire-stopping evidence and as-built records the accountable person needs to keep.
At Lexington Apartments on City Road, the full refurbishment of a two-storey flat in a registered higher-risk building received Building Control Approval from the BSR in May 2026. Melner is the Principal Contractor: new structural floor and stairs, a full rewire and M&E replacement, fire-rated linings to the fire brigade's sixty-minute expectation, and regulator inspections at every hold point.
When the client at Lexington added storage over a bathroom mid-build, the change was assessed, notified and cleared through the standstill before the steel went in.
A third project — an apartment on the third floor of an eight-storey mansion block in Mayfair — is at Gateway 2 now. Melner has worked with the architect and fire specialist through two rounds of regulator requests for information, building the fire-stopping evidence index, the external-wall penetration schedule and the compliance statements the application needed.
And for a second suite in the same Butlers Wharf building — which is Grade II listed as well as a higher-risk building — we advised on scoping the works so the client understood exactly where the line sits between what needs the Regulator and what does not, before committing to a design.
How we deliver
Regulator first. Then the build.
Full scope
Everything a higher-risk building refurbishment demands.
A higher-risk building refurbishment carries every requirement of a standard apartment fit-out plus the regulatory, evidential and procedural obligations the Building Safety Act introduces. The scope below covers both.
- Higher-risk building status check and scoping advice
- Gateway 2 application support with the principal designer
- Construction control and change control plans
- Mandatory occurrence reporting plan
- Competence declarations and evidence
- Regulator request-for-information responses
- Principal Contractor duties (Part 2A)
- Fire-stopping to tested details, with product evidence
- Compartment-wall and external-wall penetration schedules
- Fire-rated linings, doors and cavity barriers
- Structural alterations with regulator hold points
- Full M&E replacement within the building's fire strategy
- Change assessment and notification, with standstill management
- Registered building inspector liaison and inspections
- Completion certificate application
- Golden thread handover file
Planning works in a higher-risk building?
Tell us the address and what you want to do. We will tell you whether the Building Safety Regulator is involved, what that means for the programme, and how we would take it through.
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