CDM 2015 Explained: Your Duties as a Client, in Plain English
Spring & Co, Stockport. Construction & property consultants since 1992
Under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015, you as the client hold the top legal duty on a construction project. You have to make suitable arrangements for managing the work, appoint the right people in writing, give them the information they need to build safely, and make sure the health and safety file gets produced. Get those four things right and most of your exposure is gone.
We have advised commercial clients on their CDM duties across Greater Manchester since 1992, sitting on the client side of the table rather than the contractor's. The pattern almost never changes. A developer assumes the builder carries all the safety responsibility, signs nothing, hands over no information, and only finds out on an HSE visit that the duty the law puts first is the client's own. When that goes wrong, the fine and the delay both land on the client, not the contractor.
What exactly does CDM 2015 make you responsible for?
Regulation 4 gives the client a short set of core duties. Make suitable arrangements for managing the project, including welfare facilities. Provide pre-construction information to your designers and contractors. Make sure a construction phase plan is drawn up before work starts. Make sure a health and safety file is prepared, kept up to date, and handed over at the end. You do not have to do the technical work yourself. You have to make sure it happens, and then check that it did.
The word doing the heavy lifting there is "arrangements". You can appoint other people to carry out almost every task, but the accountability for putting suitable arrangements in place, and keeping them under review, stays with you. Welfare is a good test of it. The Schedule 2 requirements, toilets, washing facilities, drinking water and somewhere to rest, have to be there from the first day anyone is on site. Not week three, when the cabin finally turns up.
Do you have to appoint a principal designer and a principal contractor?
Yes, in writing, whenever more than one contractor will work on the project. That is Regulation 5, and in practice almost every real job clears the bar, because a main contractor plus a single specialist already counts as more than one. If you fail to make the appointment, the law does not let the duty vanish. It lands back on you, and you are treated as holding both roles yourself. So an unsigned appointment is genuinely worse than a signed one.
Here is where I will disagree with plenty of consultants. The appointment letter is the least important part of this. What matters is bringing your principal designer in early enough, and with enough fee, to actually influence the design before it is fixed. I would rather you name your principal designer before your architect than after. A designer brought in once the drawings are frozen can flag a buildability or a maintenance risk, but can no longer design it out cheaply, which was the entire point of the role.
We learned that the hard way on a mill refurbishment early in our CDM work. The client appointed us as principal designer after the layout was largely settled, so our influence came down to warning about access and fall risks we could no longer solve without reworking a design we had not been asked to shape. We do it earlier now, and we say so before we take the appointment.
When do you have to tell the HSE about the job?
You must notify the Health and Safety Executive on form F10 when the construction work will last longer than 30 working days and have more than 20 workers on site at the same time at any point, or when it will exceed 500 person days in total. That is Regulation 6, and the notification is the client's duty, not the contractor's. A ten-person crew working 50 days lands you exactly on the 500 person day mark.
Notifiability gets more attention than it deserves. Clients ask me first whether they need to file an F10, when the honest answer is that your duties to appoint, inform and check apply on a two-week shop fit-out just as they do on a year-long build. The F10 is a form. The arrangements are the actual job, and they do not switch on at a threshold.
Which of these duties is really yours to hold?
Most of the work is delegated, but the checking never is. This is the split we walk every client through.
| Your duty | Where it sits | Who does the technical work | What you must check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Suitable arrangements for managing the project | Reg 4(1) | You, with advice | They are written down, resourced and reviewed |
| Appoint principal designer and principal contractor in writing | Reg 5 | You | Both letters exist before work begins |
| Provide pre-construction information | Reg 4(4) | You, from surveys and records | Designers and contractors actually received it |
| Construction phase plan in place | Reg 4(5) | Principal contractor | It exists before anyone breaks ground |
| Health and safety file prepared | Reg 4(6) | Principal designer | You receive it and keep it for the building's life |
| Notify HSE on an F10 where notifiable | Reg 6 | You | More than 30 days and 20 workers, or 500 person days |
The difference between the principal designer and the principal contractor trips up a lot of first-time developers, and it is worth reading before you sign either appointment, because the two roles cover different phases and you are appointing both.
Are you a commercial client or a domestic client?
It matters, because a domestic client, someone having work done on their own home and not in connection with a business, has almost all of their CDM duties passed automatically to the contractor or the principal contractor under Regulation 7. If you are a developer, a landlord, a fund, or any business commissioning work, none of that applies to you. You are a commercial client, and every duty above is yours to hold. A landlord refurbishing a flat to let is commercial, not domestic, which surprises people every year.
What does this mean for an older building around Stockport?
A large share of the commercial stock we work on around Stockport and the wider Greater Manchester conurbation is Victorian mill and mid-century town-centre building. That single physical fact changes your pre-construction information duty. Any building put up before 2000 may contain asbestos, so a refurbishment or demolition survey under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 becomes the first document in your pre-construction information pack. Hand a contractor an old mill conversion off Chestergate with no asbestos survey and you have already breached your Regulation 4(4) duty before a single tool is lifted.
The timing makes this sharper right now. With the regeneration around Stockport town centre and the Interchange pulling a wave of refurbishment and change-of-use projects forward, more local clients are commissioning exactly the kind of work where the client duty bites hardest. Old fabric, tight urban sites, and several trades on at once. Those are the jobs where a thin pre-construction information pack turns into a stop notice.
What happens if you get it wrong?
A breach of your CDM duties is a criminal offence under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, prosecuted against you as the client. Since the Sentencing Council's definitive guideline for health and safety offences came into force on 1 February 2016, fines are scaled to the turnover of the organisation and the level of risk created, with no upper limit for the most serious cases. On top of any fine, when the HSE finds a material breach it recovers its own investigation time from you through Fee for Intervention, charged by the hour until the matter is closed.
None of that is meant to frighten you off building. It is meant to make the point that the cheapest money on any project is the money spent getting the CDM arrangements right at the start, and the most expensive is the fine and the programme delay when an inspector finds them missing. A good CDM advisor and principal designer earns the fee many times over on the first job, and the value only grows across a portfolio.
If you are a commercial client planning work anywhere in Greater Manchester or across the UK and you want a straight read on whether your project is set up to meet these duties, our construction health and safety team will walk you through it. We also provide independent project monitoring and auditing for funders and boards who need to confirm the arrangements are real rather than assumed. Talk to our team at Spring & Co or call us on 0161 476 4456. We would rather set the job up properly than untangle it after a visit.
Written by James Valentine, a director at Spring & Co, construction and property consultants working across Greater Manchester and the UK since 1992.