A client's project manager is asked for the pre-construction information. What arrives, eight days later, is a folder of survey PDFs, a planning condition schedule and a scanned asbestos register from a refurbishment two owners ago. The principal designer — appointed in writing a fortnight after the first contractor mobilised, but appointed — forwards the lot to everyone on the tender list. At that point a good many people feel they have complied with something.
The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 came into force on 6 April 2015. Ten years on, the statutory text has barely moved, and neither has what it assumes about who holds which information. That assumption is still a great deal cheaper than the resource it implies.
It helps to be clear about what sort of instrument this is. CDM is health and safety law. It is not a common data environment standard, it is not ISO 19650, and it does not name a platform. It names duty-holders, and then assumes those people can find, shape and pass information at particular moments.
Three objects, handed from one person to another
Regulation 2 defines the three information objects the rest of the instrument keeps moving around.
Pre-construction information is information in the client's possession, or reasonably obtainable by or on behalf of the client, that is relevant to the construction work, of an appropriate level of detail, and proportionate to the risks. It covers the project, planning and management, health and safety hazards — including design and construction hazards and how they will be addressed — and information in any existing health and safety file.
The construction phase plan is the plan drawn up under regulation 12 or, on a single-contractor job, under regulation 15. It is the site's live health and safety arrangement rather than a tender appendix.
The health and safety file is the file prepared under regulation 12(5), and it exists for a subsequent project on the structure. Emptying the other two objects into it defeats the purpose.
Regulation 2(2) then does a quiet piece of information work that most anniversary commentary skips over. A plan, rule, document, report or copy includes an electronic version — provided it can be retrieved or reproduced when required, and is secure from loss or unauthorised interference. Nothing in the regulations demands a ring-binder. They do demand a record somebody can still produce.
Who the text assumes is holding it
The duties sit on named people. The information sits with them only if those people can actually hold it.
The client
Regulation 4(1) requires the client to make suitable arrangements for managing the project, including the allocation of sufficient time and other resources. Regulation 4(4) is the information sentence: the client must provide pre-construction information as soon as is practicable to every designer and contractor appointed, or being considered for appointment. Regulation 4(5) then requires the client to ensure a construction phase plan exists before the construction phase begins, and that the principal designer prepares a health and safety file complying with regulation 12(5), revises it as new information arrives, and keeps it available for inspection by anyone who may need it to comply with the law.
Should the client dispose of their interest in the structure, regulation 4(7) says they discharge that last duty by handing the file to whoever acquires the interest, and making sure that person understands what the file is for.
So the assumption is not that the industry will produce a pack from somewhere. It is that the client can produce what is already in their possession, obtain what is reasonably obtainable, and keep the resulting file available after everyone has gone home. A client who cannot lay hands on last year's file is already short on this year's pre-construction information.
The principal designer
Where more than one contractor is, or is reasonably foreseeable, regulation 5(1) requires the client to appoint in writing a designer with control over the pre-construction phase as principal designer, and a contractor as principal contractor. Those appointments must be made as soon as is practicable and, at the latest, before the construction phase begins. Where the client fails to appoint, regulations 5(3) and 5(4) leave the duties sitting with the client.
Regulation 11 sets out the information job in the pre-construction phase. The principal designer must plan, manage and monitor that phase and coordinate health and safety. They must assist the client with the pre-construction information required by regulation 4(4), and, so far as it is within their control, provide it promptly and in a convenient form to every designer and contractor appointed or being considered. They must liaise with the principal contractor for the duration of the appointment and share information relevant to planning, managing and monitoring the construction phase.
Regulation 12 puts two further holdings on the same desk. The principal designer must give the principal contractor everything they hold that is relevant to the construction phase plan, including pre-construction information from the client and residual-risk information from designers under regulation 9(3)(b). During the pre-construction phase they must prepare a health and safety file appropriate to the characteristics of the project, containing information likely to be needed during any subsequent project, and review, update and revise it as they go. If the appointment ends before the project does, the file passes to the principal contractor. At the end of the project they — or the principal contractor, if no principal designer remains — pass it to the client.
Read together, that is a lot of weight on one named designer who can assemble information, filter it, and hand it on at the right moment. Leave the role unbudgeted and you have not removed the holdings. You have created a vacancy with the holdings still attached to it.
The principal contractor
Regulation 12(1) requires the principal contractor, during the pre-construction phase and before setting up a construction site, to draw up a construction phase plan or arrange for one to be drawn up. The plan must set out the health and safety arrangements and site rules and, where Schedule 3 work applies, the specific measures for those activities. Throughout the project, regulation 12(4) requires the plan to be reviewed, updated and revised so that it remains sufficient.
During the project the principal contractor must give the principal designer any information in their possession that belongs in the health and safety file. Inherit the file under regulation 12(8) and you inherit the duty to keep it current, and to pass it to the client at the end.
What the text assumes here is a plan that is alive rather than a PDF frozen at mobilisation, and a contractor who can tell residual design information from the ordinary noise of a site.
Designers and contractors
Regulation 9 requires a designer, when preparing or modifying a design, to take account of the general principles of prevention and of any pre-construction information, and to eliminate foreseeable risks so far as is reasonably practicable — including risks to the people who will later maintain, clean or use a structure designed as a workplace. Where elimination is not possible, they must reduce or control the risk, tell the principal designer, and ensure appropriate information finds its way into the health and safety file. Regulation 9(4) requires them to provide, with the design, sufficient information about design, construction or maintenance to assist the client, other designers and contractors.
Regulation 8 sits beneath all of it. A designer or contractor must not accept an appointment unless they have the skills, knowledge and experience and, if an organisation, the organisational capability. Anyone required to provide information or instruction must make it comprehensible and provide it as soon as is practicable. Anyone with a duty must cooperate to the extent necessary for others to fulfil theirs.
The assumptions there are that residual risk can be written down, that somebody will actually apply the comprehensibility test, and that people know whom they are meant to be cooperating with.
What the assumption costs when nobody is resourced
A decade of practice has not rewritten any of those holdings. It has shown, repeatedly, how often the named person cannot hold the thing.
Pre-construction information still turns up after appointment, or as a crate of PDFs that is neither convenient nor proportionate. The existing health and safety file — which regulation 2 treats as part of this project's pre-construction information — is very often the file nobody can locate, or a binder containing the last project's method statements and none of its residual risks. HSE's L153 guidance is explicit that the file is not a home for pre-construction information, the construction phase plan, contracts or method statements. The statutory text had already limited it to information likely to be needed on a subsequent project. The industry carries on filling it with whatever was nearest the printer at completion.
The construction phase plan is still routinely written to start the site and then left behind by the issued set. Regulation 12(4) assumes a plan that goes on being sufficient. A plan nobody can find in the cabin, or one that does not move when the design moves, is not doing that job.
And the principal designer duty is still, on too many jobs, a title on a form. Regulation 11 assumes somebody with control over the pre-construction phase, not a signature added once the first contractor is on site. Regulation 5's fallback — the client keeps the duties if they fail to appoint — tends to be the part clients discover in a solicitor's letter.
None of this is a software problem in the regulations. The text names a person, a moment and a test: in the client's possession or reasonably obtainable; prompt and convenient; comprehensible; retrievable; secure from loss. The Building Safety Act later added a golden-thread duty for higher-risk buildings. It repealed none of these holdings. It simply made the cost of not being able to produce the record a good deal more visible.
A Monday test
You do not need a consultant to work out whether a live job is honouring the assumption. Take one project and ask the questions the text already implies.
- Possession. Can the client point to the pre-construction information they provided under regulation 4(4) — including the previous health and safety file, if one existed — without opening a personal mailbox?
- Appointment. Is there a written principal designer and principal contractor appointment dated before the construction phase, or is the client still holding those duties under regulation 5?
- Convenient form. Did designers and contractors being considered for appointment receive that information promptly, and in a form they could use, as regulation 11(6) requires?
- Residual risk. For one live design change, can you show the designer's regulation 9(3) note to the principal designer, and the line it created in the file?
- Live plan. Is the construction phase plan the document the site is working to this week, or the document issued to start the site?
- Subsequent project. Open the health and safety file. Would a future designer planning work on this structure be safer for having it, or are they reading method statements from this job?
- Retrieval. If the file is electronic, can it be reproduced today, and is it secure from loss or unauthorised interference, as regulation 2(2) requires?
- Handover of the holding. If the principal designer has already left, can you show the file passing under regulation 12(8)? If the client has sold the interest, can you show regulation 4(7)?
In my experience the questions that produce the longest silence are the sixth and the eighth, and neither of them is about compliance paperwork. They are about whether the holding ever existed anywhere other than on the appointment schedule.
The gap ten years leaves
The regulations, HSE's guidance and — where it applies — the Building Safety Act each have their owners, and none of them will tell you how to run your information. What CDM does is describe, fairly precisely, a chain of people who are each expected to be able to produce something at a particular moment.
Cost the information work the text already names, and put the hours in the appointment. The client is the one who appoints and who pays: time for someone to assemble pre-construction information in a form designers can actually use, time for a principal designer to hold and update the health and safety file, time for a principal contractor to keep the construction phase plan sufficient as the issued set moves. That is a fee and a person's week, not a software licence, and it is the part the regulations, the guidance and — where it applies — the Building Safety Act will not do for you. Where those hours were never priced, the questions above tend to produce silence; in my experience that silence is cheaper to hear at appointment than in a solicitor's letter afterwards.
Read next: When AI reads every drawing: the end of manual register reconciliation, The principal designer's information duty that nobody resources, Safety documentation grew. Incident rates did not move..