What CDM 2015 makes you responsible for

The core duties

A commercial client must make suitable arrangements for managing the project so it is carried out without risks to health or safety, and must maintain and review those arrangements throughout.

In practice that means

• Appointing designers and contractors with the skills, knowledge, experience and organisational capability for the work
• Allowing adequate time and resources for each stage
• Providing pre-construction information to every designer and contractor, including those still bidding
• Ensuring the principal contractor, or the sole contractor on a single-contractor project, prepares a construction phase plan before work starts
• Ensuring the principal designer prepares and maintains a health and safety file
• Ensuring suitable welfare facilities are provided for the duration
• Checking that the principal designer and principal contractor are actually carrying out their duties

Appointments where there is more than one contractor

Where more than one contractor will be involved — which is most projects of any size — the client must appoint a principal designer and a principal contractor in writing.

If the client does not make those appointments, the duties do not disappear. The client takes them on personally. That is the trap: a client who assumed the builder was handling it has, by default, become the principal designer and the principal contractor.

Pre-construction information

This is the client's duty and it is the one most often skipped. Pre-construction information is what you know about the site and the building that a designer or contractor could not reasonably find out for themselves.

Asbestos surveys and registers. Existing drawings. Known services and their locations. Previous uses and contamination. Ground investigation. Site constraints, access, working hours. Restrictions from an existing occupier. Anything relevant from an earlier health and safety file.

Withholding it does not transfer the risk; it creates it. A contractor pricing without an asbestos survey either prices for the worst case or discovers the problem with a wall already open.

Notification to HSE

A project is notifiable to HSE if the construction phase will last longer than 30 working days and have more than 20 workers working simultaneously at any point, or if it will exceed 500 person days.

Where a project is notifiable, the client gives written notice to HSE — the F10 — as soon as practicable before the construction phase begins, and a copy is displayed in the site office.

Notification is a client duty. Contractors will normally prepare it, but the duty is yours and HSE will treat it as yours.

Domestic clients

A domestic client is an individual having work done on their own home, or a family member's, that is not part of any business. Their client duties pass to someone else automatically.

On a single-contractor project the duties pass to that contractor. Where there is more than one contractor they pass to the principal contractor, or, if none has been appointed, to the contractor in control of the work. Alternatively the domestic client can agree in writing with the designer that the designer takes them on as principal designer.

The letting of a property changes this. Work to a property you let is a business activity, so a landlord is a commercial client, with the duties above, however small the job.

What we ask a client for

On a commercial job we will ask for the pre-construction information at tender stage rather than after award, because it changes the price and the programme. Where the client does not hold it, we will say what is needed and help get it — but we will not price around a gap and leave it as a variation.

We will confirm in writing who has been appointed principal designer and principal contractor before work starts, and we will not begin a construction phase without a plan.