£595 a head: the CDM client course fee

HSE charges £595 per person for its one-day CDM client course, which tells you how much the regulator thinks a client needs to know before signing anything. If you are refurbishing residential blocks and cannot say whether the job is notifiable, that fee is the cheapest part of the problem.

Because the answer decides who you must notify, what must be displayed on site, and whose name sits on the paperwork when an inspector calls.

The stakes: the client duty does not move, whoever you appoint

Under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015, CDM 2015 makes a distinction between commercial clients and domestic clients. Client duties apply in full to commercial clients. For domestic clients the duties normally pass to other dutyholders. A commercial client is any individual or organisation that carries out a construction project as part of a business, and that is what a residential block refurbishment is when you run the portfolio.

The commercial client has contractual control, appoints designers and contractors, and determines the money, time and other resources for the project. You can delegate the work. You cannot delegate the duty. When a refurbishment goes wrong in a block you own, the inspector's first question is who the client was, and the answer is the entity that signed the contract.

What is a notifiable project under CDM? Two tests, either one triggers it

A project is notifiable where planned construction work will last longer than 30 working days and involves more than 20 workers at any one time. It is also notifiable where the work exceeds 500 individual worker days. Those are the two tests, and either one on its own is enough.

For notifiable projects, commercial clients must notify HSE in writing with details of the project. They must also ensure a copy of the notification is displayed in the construction site office. That second duty is the one that quietly fails, because the site office moves as the job progresses and nobody owns the noticeboard.

Run the arithmetic before you tender, not after. A residential block refurbishment with a scaffold up for a full season, several trades rotating through, and a programme that slips will cross 30 working days without anyone deciding it should. The notification is not a formality you complete at the end. It is a decision you make at the start, and it changes what you must put in place.

What the client must actually do on a residential refurbishment

Commercial clients must appoint contractors and designers to the project, including the principal designer and principal contractor on projects involving more than one contractor. On a block refurbishment that usually means more than one, so both appointments are live.

Commercial clients must make sure appointed contractors and designers have the skills, knowledge, experience and organisational capability. That is a judgement you make and can be asked to justify, so the evidence sits in the appointment file rather than in someone's recollection of the tender meeting.

Commercial clients must allow sufficient time and resources for each stage of the project. A programme compressed to suit a lease event is a client decision, and it is the client who answers for it.

Commercial clients must make sure that any principal designer and principal contractor appointed carry out their duties in managing the project. Appointing them is not the end of your involvement. Commercial clients must maintain and review the management arrangements for the duration of the project, which means the arrangements are a live item on your agenda, not a document signed at kick-off.

Commercial clients must provide pre-construction information to every designer and contractor either bidding for the work or already appointed to the project. In older residential blocks this is where the useful detail lives: asbestos surveys, the location of risers, access constraints, and what is above the ceiling void.

Commercial clients must ensure that the principal contractor or contractor, for single contractor projects, prepares a construction phase plan before that phase begins. Commercial clients must ensure that the principal designer prepares a health and safety file for the project, that it is revised as necessary, and that it is made available to anyone who needs it for subsequent work at the site. The health and safety file is the document the next refurbishment depends on, and the one most often missing when the next contractor asks for it.

Commercial clients must make sure suitable welfare facilities are provided for the duration of the construction work. On a residential refurbishment with occupied flats, welfare provision is also an occupier issue, because the site toilets, the hoarding line and the compound position are what residents complain about first.

The HSE guidance on commercial clients: roles and responsibilities sets out each of these duties, and it is short enough to read before your next project meeting. If you want the same material taught properly, HSE runs CDM: the role of the client as a one-day course, face-to-face or in-house, at £595 per person.

UK versus Singapore: same obligation, different owner

In the UK, the commercial client carries the duty, and the enforcement route runs through HSE, with the Building Safety Regulator, fire and rescue authorities and local authority building control involved depending on the building and the work. In Singapore, the equivalent duties sit with the developer or occupier under the Workplace Safety and Health framework, and the regulator is the Ministry of Manpower. The labels differ, the practical question does not: who holds contractual control, and whose name is on the appointment.

For a portfolio spanning both markets, the thing to standardise is not the form. It is the evidence pack. One folder per project, holding the appointments, the pre-construction information issued, the construction phase plan, the welfare arrangements, the notification where the project is notifiable, and the health and safety file as it is revised. That pack answers the UK question and the Singapore question with the same documents, which is what makes it worth building once.

Where a lender or funder is involved, expect a second layer of scrutiny. The Homes England monitoring surveyor framework, for example, requires an initial report that reviews the development plans and flags risk under each heading, with a certificate confirming spending is in line with project plans as a condition precedent to each draw-down. That is a financial control, but it reads the same project documents your CDM file should already contain.

Your 60-second self-check

• For every refurbishment running in your residential blocks today, could you say whether it is notifiable, and show the calculation behind that answer?
• Could you produce the HSE notification, and evidence it is displayed in the site office, for each notifiable project?
• Could you produce the current health and safety file for each block, revised as the work has progressed?

If you want a second pair of eyes on this, send the free 5-minute Director's Risk Check to whoever holds the project records, and ask them to run it at hermanwa.com/risk-check.html?m=uk. It comes back as a control score and a board-ready briefing, so the answer reaches you rather than sitting in someone else's inbox.

Herman's verdict

The notification is the easy part, because it is a form with a date on it. The health and safety file is the one that tells you whether the client duty was actually run, and it is the document nobody asks for until the next contractor needs it.

— Herman