Construction compliance

The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 apply to every construction project — dutyholders, competence, welfare, and construction phase planning. They apply in full whether or not you hold any certification.

Required for every project before the construction phase begins. Proportionate to the risk: a small-works CPP is short; what matters is that it reflects the actual site, arrangements and high-risk work.

Planning, managing, monitoring and coordinating the construction phase on projects with more than one contractor — including site rules, induction, workforce engagement and preventing unauthorised access.

Planning, managing and coordinating the pre-construction phase, identifying and eliminating or controlling foreseeable risks through design, and assembling pre-construction information.

Anyone specifying or altering a design — including temporary works designers and contractors doing design-and-build — must eliminate, reduce or control foreseeable risks through design decisions.

Organisational capability and individual skills, knowledge, training and experience matched to the work. Evidence lives in a training matrix, competence records and appointment letters — not in assertion.

Site-specific inductions covering the real risks and rules of this site, recorded against the individual, refreshed when the site changes materially.

Task-specific assessment and method, briefed to the people doing the work, kept aligned with what the site is actually doing. A generic RAMS that does not match the task is worse than none — it evidences that nobody looked.

The Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 require assessment and control of substance exposure — dusts, fumes, resins, cement — with health surveillance where exposure demands it.

Short, recorded, task-relevant briefings. Their value is currency and relevance; a signature sheet for a talk nobody remembers evidences nothing.

Formal authorisation for high-risk activities — hot works, confined spaces, excavations, energised systems, and temporary works hold points under BS 5975 — with defined issue, supervision and hand-back.

Site emergency arrangements and construction fire safety: escape, alarm, fire-fighting provision proportionate to the phase, hot-works control, and drills that actually happen.

The Work at Height Regulations 2005: avoid, prevent, mitigate — in that order. Scaffold inspection regimes, edge protection, MEWP planning and rescue arrangements all live here.

LOLER 1998: planned lifts, competent appointed persons, examined equipment, and lift plans that match the load, the ground and the crane — including outrigger loading assessed on adequate support.

Support or battering before entry, services located before digging, daily and post-event inspections, and materials, plant and spoil kept back from edges.

BS 5975 procedural control: designated individual, temporary works coordinator, register, design briefs, independent design checks by category, and permits at erection, loading and striking hold points. Our specialist area — professional design and checking via Temporary Works Consulting & Design Ltd.

Segregating people and plant: site traffic plans, exclusion zones, marshalling, visibility aids and maintained routes — reviewed as the site changes, not filed at mobilisation.

Health surveillance and monitoring where exposures require it — noise, vibration, dust, sensitisers — plus fitness-for-task considerations. Construction kills far more people by disease than by accident.

Respirable crystalline silica control, noise assessment and hearing protection zones, and HAVS exposure points tracked per person per day — with records that would stand behind a claim years later.

Fuel and silt control near drains and watercourses, dust and noise management for neighbours, consents and exemptions in place before the activity that needs them.

Duty of care from skip to final destination: classification, carrier checks, transfer documentation, hazardous waste handling — a complete paper chain, because the producer stays liable.

RIDDOR 2013 reporting duties plus internal near-miss capture and investigation that reaches root cause and closes actions — the difference between recording history and preventing repetition.

Layered assurance: statutory inspections (scaffolds, excavations, lifting equipment), routine site inspections, and system audits to ISO 19011 guidance — each finding tracked to closure.

Approval before appointment, RAMS review before start, monitoring during the work and performance review after — not a folder of insurance certificates collected once.

A maintained register of the legislation that applies to your activities, with evidence of periodic compliance evaluation. Ours is built into SHEQ System and linked to the documents that serve each instrument.

One current version, visible approval, superseded copies withdrawn — on site as well as in the office. The single most common audit finding in construction businesses of every size.

O&M information, test and inspection records, as-builts and the health and safety file content delivered as agreed — collected through the job, not archaeologically at the end.