Feel secure about meeting your Health and Safety obligations

With the right advice, everyone involved with your project will meet all the Regulations without getting tangled up in red tape — and your bottom line will benefit, too.

Find out your responsibilities for the project you are planning

Meeting CDM Regulations makes your project more profitable, by

• Helping ensure the project is completed on time, within budget and to the required standards
• Reducing costs, delays and bad publicity resulting from accidents or ill health
• Fully planning for all cleaning, maintenance and repair issues
• Reducing whole-life costs of the new structure
• Providing useful information for the maintenance and possible future development of the structure

How else do the CDM Regulations help?

Which Regulations will apply to your project?

The Regulations change, according to how long the project will take to build and how many people are involved.

• Non-notifiable project: likely to take less than 30 days or 500 person-days of construction work
• Notifiable project: likely to take more than 30 days or 500 person-days of construction work

If in doubt, assume your project is Notifiable — or seek help from your designer or The Association for Project Safety .

For both types of project, the Regulations ensure that you:

• Engage the right professionals and contractors
• Have a realistic project programme so it all gets done properly
• Identify risks, so that the construction and workers are safe from harm
• Cooperate with your team, and coordinate your work with theirs, to achieve the most efficient project
• Have workplaces that comply with all relevant Health and Safety legislation

Find someone to do this for you

For Notifiable projects, you must also make sure that you:

• Appoint a CDM Coordinator  to take care of all the Health and Safety matters, before significant detailed design work is done
• Appoint a Principal Contractor as soon as possible, to advise on buildability and maintainability, and to plan and manage the construction work
• Agree the contents and format of the Health and Safety File — an important legal document which the CDM Coordinator will keep up to date
• Keep the Health and Safety File safe and make it available to anyone who needs it. When you dispose of your interest in the structure you must also pass on the File to those acquiring it

What happens if you don't carry out these duties?

• If you fail to appoint a CDM Coordinator or Principal Contractor you will be legally liable for their duties and deemed to be carrying them out
• You could leave yourself open to potentially very expensive civil action
• You will miss out on the advantages listed above
• You could face criminal prosecution by the Health and Safety Executive

Who can help you with Health and Safety requirements?

The Association for Project Safety keeps a database  of Individual and Registered Practices who can act as CDM Coordinators:

The Association for Project Safety
Stanhope House
12 Stanhope Place
Edinburgh EH12 5HH
Tel     08456 1221290
Fax    08456 121291
www.aps.org.uk

The Health and Safety Executive
0845 345 0055
www.hse.gov.uk