CDM 2015: Where are we now?
Louis Wustemann looks at how the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations are working in practice, over thirty years since they were first introduced.
The first Construction (Design and Management) Regulations – CDM for short – came into force in 1994, to fulfil an EU directive born out of concerns that high accident rates in the building industry were down at least partly to a failure of clients and contractors to identify and communicate risks properly, leaving workers exposed. The regulations have been revised twice since they were introduced; the latest version came into force in 2015.
In the 10 years from 2015 to 2025 the annual rate of self-reported construction injuries in Great Britain fell by almost a fifth, from 3,080 per 100,000 workers to 2,500. There was no corresponding fall in the comparable figure for the whole economy in the same period, though construction injuries remain well above the all-sector average. How much of the fall in construction injuries can be attributed to the impact of CDM, or any regulations is debatable – but the overall trend in construction accidents seems one of improvement in a period when resources for inspection and enforcement were seriously reduced.
Roles and responsibilities
CDM 2015 left the role of one of the main dutyholders, the Principal Contractor (PC), largely unchanged, but gave them some of the communication duties of the old CDM Coordinator (a role that was abolished in 2015) and some to the Principal Designer (PD), a new role introduced by the new regulations.
Since these are “roles” rather than fixed jobs, there is some fluidity about who takes them on. The client who fails to appoint a PD or a PC may end up with their responsibilities, for example. Many organisations are still unclear about their duties as clients and when they assume the responsibilities of the PD or PC. It’s not just small organisations, even local authorities struggle, especially with projects which do not seem like full-scale construction work. It’s easy to forget that CDM applies to any job that involves construction tools or methods, from installing a chiller unit to mending a wall. The trigger for enhanced duties and notifying the Health and Safety Executive is when a project is expected to last more than 30 days and involve more than 20 workers at once, or to exceed 500 working days in total. But clients are often fuzzy about these thresholds or about who should inform the authorities.
The enforcement record under the regulations supports his point about confusion, or suggests there are organisations willing to ignore their duties. There have been more than 200 prosecutions under CDM 2015, resulting in penalties totalling £16mn. Analysis by CDM support services firm HASpod in 2023 found that the most common breaches of the then 191 convictions under the regulations involved failure to discharge PC duties (37 per cent of cases) or contractor duties (25 per cent).
Building Regulations
As part of the reform of building safety regulation that is still underway after the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, the Government introduced the Building Safety Act 2022 which included provisions to overhaul the Building Regulations.
The Building Regulations etc. (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2023 set down new legal dutyholder roles for those commissioning, designing and constructing buildings in England, which adopted the role names as CDM, including Client, Principal Designer and Principal Contractor.
Paul Nash is Director of Paul Nash Consultancy and former President of the Chartered Institute of Building. He sat on Dame Judith Hackitt’s Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety and is a member of the statutory Building Advisory Committee that advises the Building Safety Regulator on the safety and standards of all buildings.
Though the two sets of regulations use the same titles, he warns that the similarity ends there. “These are separate statutory instruments, and both the duties, and the skills required to discharge them, are very different,” says Paul. “Fundamentally the new dutyholder roles created under the Building Safety Act are about ensuring compliance with Building Regulations to ensure that buildings are safe for those who occupy them.”
The legislation does allow for the same organisation to undertake both roles but Paul stresses that “they must have the required organisational capability, and the individuals they use must be competent”, defined in legislation as skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours.
“Even if you're using the same company, technically these need to be separate appointments because they have separate duties, that's the key thing,” he says,
Compliance
Considering the wider picture of CDM compliance, the essential message to anyone involved in a project covered by the regulations is to be clear what your duties are. If you don't understand, ask someone who does or look at L153 Managing Health and Safety in Construction https://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/books/l153.htm, the HSE’s free code of practice with advice on CDM compliance.
Paul Nash agrees: “Being competent, and only acting within the limits of your competence, is now written into legislation, knowing what your legal duties are and complying with those duties is not optional”. But he argues that the mindset that sees CDM duties merely as a compliance issue is a wasted opportunity, especially for clients. “This approach can perpetuate the problem of compromised buildings, hard to maintain safely, whereas, actually there was a solution, that you could have designed in from the outset,” he says.
He believes there is a real benefit in seeing CDM as a process that can add not just assurance of smooth project operation, without unnecessary safety failings but actually add value by getting everyone involved in the design and construction to work through and minimise the risks in the making and use of a built asset.
“I'd love to see that,” says Paul of this positive approach, “because I think that could allow the role to go beyond compliance, to ask ‘how can we influence and deliver better outcomes?’”
