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INSIGHTS SITE LINES
Evidencing competency: Who is the judge?
Nigel Ostime, architect and principal at Ostime Consulting, questions the effectiveness of the new competency requirements for Principal Designers under the Building Safety Act, asking whether the varied systems plus no unified vetting will ensure safety.
O
ne of the glaring issues highlighted by the Grenfell Inquiry was a lack of competency; this was across the board and from top to bottom, and it included the architects. So
perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the principal requirements of the new legislation has been for designers and Principal Designers to actively demonstrate and evidence their ability to perform their roles. But is there consistency across the industry, and if not, what should be done to achieve that?
Clients’ duties
Clients have an important role to play, and they can’t just be passengers in the process. They have similar duties under the Building Regulations as they have under CDM. As with CDM they have an obligation to appoint a Principal Designer and a Principal Contractor, albeit a ‘BR PD’ and a ‘BR PC’ as opposed to a ‘CDM PD’ and ‘CDM PC’.
If they fail to make these appointments, they are then required to fulfil the duties themselves, which is impractical or even unachievable for most clients.
The regulations stipulate that the Principal Designer must be appointed, in writing, before the construction phase begins, or before submitting an application for Building Control approval for a higher-risk building, but these are ‘longstops’ and in practice the appointment needs to be much earlier.
Clients have a duty to appoint a competent person to undertake the work, so there is an expectation they will undertake due diligence, probably by checking against previous projects and ensuring that the key people have the right accreditations. Where clients appoint an organisation, the organisation must designate a competent individual to carry out the functions of the role. This does not make the individual the Principal Designer or Principal Contractor – the legal responsibilities remain with the organisation. Clients also have to make a declaration at the end of a project that to the best of their knowledge the work complies with regulations, which is a new responsibility.
Duties of the PD Under CDM, the Principal Designer is required to: • Plan, manage and monitor the pre-construction phase and to coordinate matters relating to health and safety; and to
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• Ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that projects are designed and managed without risks to the health and safety of those who build, use and maintain them.
Under the Building Regulations, the Principal Designer is required to do the following: • Plan, manage and monitor the design work during the design phase of the project
• Coordinate matters relating to the design work comprised in the project so that all reasonable steps are taken to ensure that the design is such that if the building work to which the design relates were built in accordance with that design the building work would be in compliance with all relevant requirements.
The ‘relevant requirements’ are the functional requirements of the Building Regulations 2010, as set out in Schedule 1 (so Part A, B, etc), plus the requirements of regulations 4, 6, 7, 8, 22, 23, 25B, 26, 26A, 28, 36, 41(2)(a), 42(2)a, 44A, 44ZA, 44ZC, and 44D-44I. The BR PD must take ‘all reasonable steps’ to ensure the design work on a project is co-ordinated and demonstrates compliance with the Building Regulations. This is effectively a response to Dame Judith Hackitt’s call for a more “robust ownership of accountability.” The aim is to provide regulation of an industry where, as we saw with Grenfell Tower, design responsibilities have been split across multiple parties and have been lacking in terms of overall coordination.
Individual designers remain responsible for the compliance of their own design work, but the BR PD has overall responsibility for coordinating the design process.
ADF NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2024
Individual designers remain responsible for the compliance of their own design work, but the BR PD has overall responsibility for coordinating the design process
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