There is a particular silence that settles over a project waiting on a Gateway Two determination. Nobody can build. Nobody can demobilise. And nobody is entirely sure who is paying for the interval.
The statutory position is straightforward enough. The commercial position is not. Standard forms were drafted for a world in which regulatory approval was a condition precedent measured in weeks, and a great many contracts entered into since 2023 still carry that assumption in their programme.
The preliminaries problem
A contractor holding a site team, a compound and a supply chain through an open-ended approval window is burning money at a rate that no risk allowance anticipated. The mechanisms that would normally distribute that cost — relevant events, relevant matters, extension of time — were not written with this cause in mind, and their operation is contested almost by default.
A delay nobody has allocated is a dispute that has simply not been filed yet.
What better practice looks like
The projects handling this well are doing three things. They are treating the Gateway as a design milestone rather than an administrative one, and resourcing it accordingly. They are amending the contract to name the Gateway explicitly as a relevant event with a defined cost consequence. And they are being candid with funders about the programme before the funding is committed rather than after.
None of that is complicated. It simply requires someone to say out loud, early, that the approval will take longer than the bid assumed.