Anyone working in the construction industry should be familiar with the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2007 (CDM)—they place legal duties on almost everyone involved in construction work. By assigning responsibility and establishing guidelines for safe work, the CDM Regulations help improve on-site health and safety, ensure your employees are competent, and support your risk management strategies.
But the CDM Regulations are about to change—on 9 January 2015 the HSE released draft guidance on the new Construction (Design and Management) Regulations (2015) which will come into force on 6 April 2015. The HSE believes the new CDM Regulations will simplify the existing regulations, reduce paperwork, and improve health and safety standards on smaller construction sites.
Neglecting to familiarise yourself with the changes could be disastrous—non-compliance increases your employees’ chances of suffering an accident, threatens the integrity of your finished structure, generates fines, and could even lead to prosecution. Some of the relevant changes in the new CDM Regulations going into effect in April 2015 include the following:
- Replacing the CDM co-ordinator role – Under CDM 2007 the co-ordinator was responsible for facilitating communication between dutyholders and liaising with the HSE, and were only required for certain types of projects. To simplify things, the HSE is replacing the co-ordinator role with the principal designer, meaning that an existing member of the design team will be responsible for coordinating the crucial pre-construction phase.
- Granting the client more responsibility – Clients (people who are having construction or building work carried out) will be responsible for notifying the HSE if on-site construction work will exceed 30 working days and have more than 20 employees working simultaneously or if the project will exceed 50 working days. For the first time domestic clients (people who have construction work carried out on their own home) have responsibilities under the new CDM Regulations.
- Requiring written Construction Phase Plans – Clients must now ensure that their Contractors provide a written Construction Phase Plan before any work commences—this applies to smaller and domestic projects which were previously exempt from the CDM Regulations.
For more detailed guidance on the CDM Regulations 2015 and how to comply, click here: www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/books/l153.htm.
