Following May’s long-awaited CDM review, PSJ staff examine its key findings and recommendations while unpacking the legal implications to the proposed changes, and look ahead to what happens next.
The Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) second Post Implementation Review (PIR) of the CDM Regulations 2015 is an important moment to reflect on how CDM is working in practice in the UK construction sector. Standard statutory reviews serve to ask a simple question: did the regulations achieve their objectives, and do those objectives remain fit for purpose?
And whilst the PIR concludes that the overarching principles of CDM 2015 remain sound and that the legislative framework continues to support positive health and safety outcomes, the reality experienced on the ground paints a far more nuanced picture.
For practitioners, clients and safety leaders, the review highlights systemic structural frictions. The regulatory framework is not slated for statutory amendment; instead, any realignment will rely on strengthened guidance and industry-led standards.
To navigate this landscape, we must examine where the original intentions of CDM 2015 diverged from practice and particularly around dutyholder competence, information management, client capability and the cross-over with the evolving building regulations regime.
Competence and role clarity: the core friction
A primary ambition of the 2015 reforms was deregulation with a purpose: removing the independent CDM coordinator (CDMC) role to ensure health and safety coordination was embedded directly within the active design team via the principal designer (PD). A decade on, evidence suggests this structural transition has not unfolded entirely as hoped. In practice, the PD CDM duty continues to be outsourced to external consultants in a considerable number of projects.
Simultaneously, the reduction of explicit, prescriptive legislative criteria for competence, which was intended to streamline compliance, has created some unintended consequences:
- Lower barrier to entry: reduced prescription has led to a dilution of competence expectations. Ill-suited individuals or entities often assume the PD CDM role without possessing the requisite safety-critical capabilities.
- Market undercutting: a lack of clear, statutory benchmarks enables commercial undercutting on both price and quality, placing qualified health and safety professionals at a competitive disadvantage.
- Confusion with building regulations: the arrival of the principal designer under the building regulations (PD BR) has compounded role confusion. The PIR re-confirmed that PD CDM and PD BR are distinct statutory functions requiring distinct competencies, yet industry practice frequently blurs the boundaries.
To mitigate these risks, industry feedback points toward formal mechanisms, such as explicit registration or licences to practice for safety-critical dutyholders. In response, the Association for Project Safety (APS) strongly supports the PIR’s call for greater clarity and is proactively developing a dedicated competence framework to uphold professional standards.
The client gap and the rise of the CDM advisor
Client capability remains one of the most significant vulnerabilities highlighted by the PIR. While clients hold ultimate accountability for setting project parameters, a lack of understanding regarding their legal duties continues to hinder effective delivery. Clients frequently seek prescriptive clarity to understand exactly what compliance requires.
Where lead designers or clients struggle to fulfil or oversee these complex coordination duties, industry has stepped in to bridge the structural capability gap informally. This has given rise to the CDM advisor – a non-statutory role, often filled by former CDMCs, hired to support clients and PDs.
The informal CDM advisor role successfully plugs a critical expertise gap, yet because it lacks statutory recognition, setting consistent competence expectations across the market remains difficult.
Furthermore, principal designers themselves regularly stretch their scopes to educate and guide clients on statutory responsibilities. To address this, future guidance must clearly define pre-construction complexity and reinforce the necessity of appointing competent principal designers early in the project lifecycle. While early appointments are increasingly driven by risk-aware and repeat clients who recognise value, late appointments remain a widespread barrier to effective risk prevention.
Information management: overwhelmed, not informed
Information flow during pre-construction represents another major theme within the PIR. Despite digital advancements, construction risk management remains plagued by a paradox: projects are inundated with data, yet critical safety information is frequently lost.
Key failure points identified include:
- Information overload: transmitting vast volumes of generic documentation through project management platforms without context or targeted delivery.
- Lack of risk prioritisation: obscuring significant, high-consequence hazards behind low-level routine safety compliance paperwork.
The consensus among safety professionals is clear: industry must refocus on delivering the right information to the right people at the right time. Clients must take ownership of defining information requirements and systems early on. The industry is shifting toward lifecycle-based information models that dynamically integrate risk management with digital information management, so data is an active safety tool rather than a compliance exercise.
Guidance and systemic industry challenges
The PIR reinforces that the construction sector does not suffer from a scarcity of guidance; rather, it suffers from an accessibility and usability deficit. Existing guidance is often overly complex, generic, and unhelpful for non-experts or time-poor clients. Practitioners instead rely on peer dialogue, direct experience, and targeted sector-specific frameworks. If the regulations themselves are not to be revised, existing guidance must be streamlined – potentially through strengthened Approved Codes of Practice (ACOP) or practical, actionable toolkits.
These regulatory delivery issues are further exacerbated by systemic, long-term workforce challenges:
- Persistent skills shortages across technical disciplines;
- Weak diversity and inadequate talent pipelines into construction and safety roles; and
- Fragmented training pathways and uncoordinated engagement with educational institutions.
The path ahead for dutyholders
The second CDM PIR demonstrates that while the legislative foundation of CDM 2015 remains fit for purpose, its real-world execution requires rebalancing. The regulation itself will not change, meaning the burden of improvement falls squarely on guidance, professional standards and industry culture.
For project safety professionals, the direction is clear. We must move beyond passive compliance and focus on proving verified competence, embedding early influence, demanding clear client requirements, and driving concise, risk-focused information management across the entire project lifecycle.
