On the 6th April 2015 the Construction Design & Management (CDM) Regulations 2015 came into force in England/Wales and Scotland, replacing CDM 2007. CDM Regulations aim to help you ensure that your construction project is a safe build, safe to use, safe to maintain and delivers good value by:
- Helping to reduce bureaucracy and paperwork by placing focus on planning and management, rather than the plan and other paperwork.
- Simplifying the regulations to improve clarity – Making it easier for duty holders to know what is expected from them.
- Encouraging more integration by strengthening the requirements regarding co-ordination and co-operation, particularly between designers and contractors.
- Simplifying the assessments of competence (both for organisations and individuals) to help raise standards and reduce bureaucracy.
- Maximising their flexibility in order to fit with the vast range of contractual arrangements.
CDM Regulations 2015 require small and medium sized construction businesses to plan and manage Health & Safety.
The main differences in the 2015 CDM Regulations are as follows:
- CDM Co-ordinators have been replaced with principal designers
- Clients will have more responsibility
- Principal Contractors have additional coordination duties
- ACOP has been replaced with guidance documents as of January 2015
- Threshold for notifiable projects has increased
- Competency of duty holders is gone and replaced with skills, knowledge and experience
- Domestic clients are included
There is a 6 month transition period to cover existing projects which will be covered by the CDM Regulations 2007. After the 15 October 2015 all projects will need to transfer to the 2015 Regulations. There are several transitional arrangements, where there is, or is expected to be more than one contractor on a project:
- Where the construction phase has not yet started and the client has not yet appointed a CDM co-ordinator, the client must appoint a principal designer as soon as possible.
- If the CDM co-ordinator has already been appointed and the construction phase has started, the client must appoint a principal designer to replace the CDM co-ordinator by 6 October 2015, unless the project comes to an end before then.
- In the period it takes to appoint the principal designer, the appointed CDM co-ordinator should comply with the duties contained in Schedule 4 of CDM 2015.
Other transitional arrangements include:
- Pre-construction information, construction phase plans or Health & Safety files provided under CDM 2007 are recognised as meeting the equivalent requirements in CDM 2015.
- Any project notified under CDM 2007 is recognised as notification under CDM 2015.
- A principal contractor appointed under CDM 2007 will be considered to be a principal contractor under CDM 2015.
Sources:
CDM 2015 – Transitional Period: http://www.hse.gov.uk/construction/cdm/regulation-changes.htm
CDM 2015: http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/priced/l153.pdf
CDM 2015 – Changes: http://rlb.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/final-cdm-changes-2015.pdf
