Regulations & standards
What are the CDM Regulations 2015?
The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 are the main health and safety regulations for construction work in Great Britain. They allocate duties to named roles across a project, from client to contractor.
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<img src="https://buildoptix.co.uk/glossary/cdm-2015/diagram.svg" alt="CDM 2015 — diagram from BuildOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://buildoptix.co.uk/glossary/cdm-2015">What are the CDM Regulations 2015?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://buildoptix.co.uk">BuildOptix</a>
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</figure>Their organising idea is that safety is decided long before anyone is on site. By placing duties on the client and the designer as well as the contractor, they put responsibility where the decisions that create risk are actually made.
They apply to construction work generally rather than only to large projects. What changes with size and complexity is which roles must be appointed and which documents must exist, not whether the regulations apply at all.
The duties are on roles, not on companies. One organisation can hold several, and a firm that designs and builds carries the designer duties as well as the contractor ones whether or not it has thought of itself that way.
What goes wrong in practice
- A client assuming their duties transfer to the principal contractor, when the client duties are their own and remain so.
- A design-and-build contractor overlooking that it holds designer duties for the parts it designs.
- Treating the regulations as paperwork for large projects, when the duties attach to small ones too.