Souped-up safety

The intentions of the Construction (Design & Management) Regulations 1994 -to encourage joined-up thinking among all parties in a construction project team for safety’s sake - have always been good.

But you know what they say the road to hell is paved with.

As it happened, CDM tended to push parties further into their respective silos. It allowed them to assume they had done their bit, and so the regulations ended up being less effective than was wished for.

But get ready for a much beefier CDM. For over two years an HSE-led working group has been drawing up changes. Now they’ve unveiled them, and industry, especially clients, had better pay attention. Here are some of the key new rules:

1 Clients can’t delay...

Currently, clients can appoint a planning supervisor and believe they have effectively dusted their hands of health and safety. A further sin is that they often appoint the planning supervisor too late for him to have much effect. That’s going to change. From day one the client will have liability for health and safety. He will have help, though, in the form of a project co-ordinator. This position replaces the planning supervisor, and seems to have been given a bigger role from the start. The client can delay appointing a project co-ordinator, but if he does, he is deemed to be the project co-ordinator himself until he gets round to appointing one, so all the things a project co-ordinator must do cannot be put off.

2 ...and They can’t pass the buck, either

Under current regulations, clients can appoint an agent to act on their behalf. This was intended for public projects where, say, the secretary of state for transport is technically the client for widening the M1, but really the county council oversees the project. What actually happened was that all manner of ‘advisers’ came forward offering to be the client’s agent, which distanced the client from his duties even more. Now, the client has got to take responsibility himself. Even consortia have to elect one of their members to take on the duties of client. Another loophole closed.

3 Small firms take note

One of the most ambiguous things about CDM has been the five-person rule, which says that if you’ve got fewer than five people on the job, it falls outside the regs. But who makes up the five? Operatives? Supervisors? The director who shows up once? You can see that with these fuzzy boundaries a vast swathe of work could be exempted. So the working group now proposes a more detailed approach for all “notifiable” projects: ie the projects you’ve got to notify the HSE about because they will last 30 or more days, or involve 500-person days.

4 ...And you designers

This is one of the more controversial proposals. If you’re a designer you can’t focus just on the fabric of the building. You’ve got to ensure the safe use of the premise, too. Take a multi-storey car park. You’ve designed the ceilings to not fall down, but your aisles are too narrow and cars are banging into each other. Not good enough! This is controversial because we’re getting into the whole fitness-for-purpose arena, which has traditionally been the domain of the civil courts. CDM is criminal stuff.

5 better planning, better project

“Right, you’re hired. I want you on site Monday.” We’ve all heard this before, and it’s a real problem because the HSE believes a disproportionate number are killed in the early stages of a project. The more time for planning, the better, and safer the project will be. Which is why the working group wants the new regs to protect the mobilisation period as specified by the project co-ordinator at tender. This new rule, for notifiable projects only, will prevent contractors having to rush to prepare the site thanks to unready or indecisive clients.

6 just Be honest

Are you really competent to do this job? No little doubts at all? Could you prove your competence in court? The current regulations stipulate that the party who engages the contractor or designer must be sure the people he’s hiring can actually do the job. The new regulations go a step further. Both parties will have to satisfy themselves as to competence. What’s the difference? Currently only the party engaging the subcontractor can be faulted for hiring an incompetent subcontractor. He gets done for believing a lie, in a sense. In the new regime, he still gets done, but so does the subcontractor, for telling the lie.

The revised guidance recommends a series of questions for gauging whether you can handle the job. Have you done it before? Are you a member of a related professional Institution? Do you hold a qualification in the relevant field?

7 Keeping record

This is a sensible little bit of progress. Currently you’ve got to keep a health and safety file on each project undertaken on a single structure, outlining the hidden problems for the benefit of those who follow on at a later stage.

The problem is you get separate documents about various bits of the same structure, making a holistic view of the structure difficult to achieve. The solution? The new regulations will require an overall structure file, so that each new piece of information is woven into the whole.

So, these are the highlights. You can view the proposals at: http://www.consultations.hse.gov.uk/consult.ti/conregs

The consultation period ends on 29 July, so if you don’t like what you see you had better get on it. There’s no point whingeing after it becomes law, either in October 2006 or, if there is a lot of contention, April 2007.