Planning & documents
What is a construction phase plan?
A construction phase plan sets out the health and safety arrangements, site rules and control measures for the construction phase of a project. It must exist before construction work begins.
Use this diagram+
Free to use on your own site, in training material or in a handout, as long as the credit link stays on it. Paste this where you want the diagram to appear.
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<img src="https://buildoptix.co.uk/glossary/construction-phase-plan/diagram.svg" alt="construction phase plan — diagram from BuildOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://buildoptix.co.uk/glossary/construction-phase-plan">What is a construction phase plan?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://buildoptix.co.uk">BuildOptix</a>
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</figure>It is the site's own document rather than a generic policy. A plan that could be handed to any project without amendment is not describing this one, and that is exactly what an inspector looks for on picking it up.
It is required for every project, with the depth scaling to the work. A domestic extension needs a short, specific plan; a plan that runs to two hundred pages of standard text on the same job is worse, because nobody will read it.
It is a live document. The site at week twenty is not the site at week one, and a plan that has not changed across a project that has is evidence that it stopped being used.
What goes wrong in practice
- A template with the project name changed and nothing else, which reads as such immediately.
- Written after work started, with the date on it saying so.
- Never revised as the sequence, the trades or the site set-up changed.
- Held in the site office and unknown to the people doing the work it describes.