CDM regulations: the duties land on roles, not on job titles

The CDM regulations — the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations — place health and safety duties on the people who commission, design and carry out construction work. The duties attach to roles — client, principal designer, designer, principal contractor, contractor, worker — and a business can hold more than one of them on the same project.

The most common misunderstanding is that CDM applies only to large sites. It applies to construction work generally, including small commercial refurbishments and domestic projects, with the difference being how much is required and to whom the client’s duties pass, not whether the regulations apply at all.

Who holds which CDM duty

• Client: makes suitable arrangements for managing the project, provides pre-construction information, and ensures the other duty holders are appointed in writing.
• Principal designer: plans, manages and monitors the pre-construction phase and coordinates health and safety in design.
• Designer: eliminates foreseeable risks in the design where possible, and provides information about those that remain.
• Principal contractor: plans, manages and monitors the construction phase, and prepares the construction phase plan.
• Contractor: plans and carries out their own work safely, and cooperates with the principal contractor.
• Where there is more than one contractor, the client must appoint a principal designer and a principal contractor in writing — and if they do not, the client carries those duties themselves.

The three CDM regulations documents

1. Pre-construction information: what the client knows about the site and the project that affects safety — existing structures, services, asbestos surveys, access constraints — given to designers and contractors before they price and plan.
2. Construction phase plan: how the work will be managed safely, prepared before work starts and kept current as the project changes.
3. Health and safety file: information for whoever maintains or alters the structure later, handed to the client at the end and kept for the life of the building.
4. Notification to the enforcing authority where the project exceeds the duration or worker thresholds — a notice, not a permission.

The health and safety file is the duty most often forgotten, because it is due at the point when everyone has moved on. It matters years later, when someone opens a wall and needs to know what is behind it — and a file that was never assembled cannot be produced when the next project starts. The same applies to the site induction register: it is evidence only if it was kept as the work happened.

Domestic clients

For domestic clients the duties do not disappear; they normally pass to the contractor, or to the principal contractor where there is more than one, unless there is a written agreement for the principal designer to take them. Builders working for homeowners are therefore holding client duties in addition to their own, whether or not anyone has said so.

This is worth stating plainly to homeowners at quotation stage. It explains why the paperwork exists, and it prevents the awkward version of the conversation later, when an incident makes the question of who was responsible urgent.

Ettex Records keeps the appointments, the pre-construction information issued, the construction phase plan with its revisions and the health and safety file against the project, so the duties can be evidenced as they were discharged rather than reconstructed. What the arrangements should be remains a competence question for the duty holders, and the regulations differ across jurisdictions — check the version that applies to the site.