Are you ready for CDM 2015?

It is a well-established fact that the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations (CDM), and the principles enshrined in them, are a crucial part of ensuring the safety of construction projects. This holds particularly true for the Data C industry. Often projects are undertaken in highly demanding locations, on tight timescales and bring together multiple trades in a complex and highly engineered space. This poses inevitable challenges wherever you have trades and skills working in close proximity.

Now, to better align with EU legislation the Health & Safety Executive is making some changes to CDM, and we welcome many of these, which will optimise the achievement of best practice. Beyond the self-evident aim to ‘maintain or improve worker protection’, some of the standouts in the HSE’s stated policy objectives behind the CDM 2015 update are to simplify the regulatory package, ‘discourage bureaucracy’ and focus on improving health and safety standards on small construction sites. In addition, CDM 2015 will implement the European Temporary or Mobile Construction Sites Directive (TMCSD) ‘in a proportionate way,’ and ‘meet better regulation principles.’

One of the key changes within CDM 2015 will be to replace the CDM-c role with a new role, that of the ‘principal designer’. The responsibility for discharging the function will rest with an individual or business in control of the procurement and pre-construction phase (i.e. the client). It is this element of control and influence over the design which marks a fundamental shift from the previous CDM-c role.

Importantly, the default position will be that the responsibility for discharging the function will sit within the existing project team, facilitating an integrated approach to risk management.

(More information on this can be found in HSE document CD261, page 11, item 42 & 43.)

Implications for clients
In short, HSE wants to realign the way in which the co-ordination function is delivered, and want it to be seen as an integral business function rather than a separate, and in many cases external, add-on.

Quite often the CDM-c is engaged too late in the planning stage and is not fully up to speed with the potential hazards and risks. Moving away from a default position where an external contractor is appointed will deliver considerable economies of scale.

If you are planning a project that will involve more than one contractor, you will need to appoint a Principal Designer and Principal Contractor. You must have a suitable and sufficient construction phase H&S plan in place, regardless of the project size, value and duration.

Installing or upgrading a highly efficient and high performance infrastructure has to happen in a safe and secure environment, where neither standards or availability are compromised. Where the designer is also managing the delivery and construction works, it makes perfect sense to appoint one contractor to fulfil both of these roles. This way the client can be re-assured that the internal co-ordination and communication is both reliable and effective.

Being armed with experience of managing and running such complex projects, and ensuring supervising teams are used to this type of project, are key to safe delivery. As designers with many years of experience in this field, we understand the importance of designing not just efficient and high performance systems, but also solutions which are simple to construct, implement and finally manage. Such experience and knowledge, coupled with the changes in CDM itself facilitating best practice, help us to protect not only our customers, but also our employees, in what are very sensitive and challenging construction environments.

About Keysource and Justin Busk, Head of Safety, Health and Environment
Keysource is an award-winning deliverer of data centre projects, specialising in the design, build, and management of business critical environments. It has extensive experience, including delivering some of the most efficient and resilient data centres in the world. A senior Health and Safety professional and CDM coordinator on a number of complex projects, Justin is a Chartered H&S professional who sits on a number of technical steering groups.