We offer our customers a comprehensive consultancy service to manage their duties for compliance with the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2007. This includes projects where we are the designers, and also stand-alone commissions for us to manage the compliance of others.
Enforced by the Health & Safety Executive (HSE), the regulations apply to construction projects that involve more than 30 days on site or more than 500 person days of work. They are designed to:
- Ensure the highest standards of health and safety on site
- Manage risks by ensuring the project uses suitably qualified and experienced people
- Promote a pro-active approach by 'designing out' risks from the beginning instead of mitigating the effects later.
We employ a number of dedicated CDM Co-ordinators across the NPS Group. Most of the work we do is within long-term partnerships with local authorities, relating to projects in their property portfolio. While it is the authority or other customer that retains responsibility, we provide all the guidance they need and help them to ensure that all mandatory paperwork is signed and in place.
We see CDM compliance not as a liability or a source of budget over-runs, but as an opportunity to apply innovative value engineering to a project. In this way we can often reduce the cost of a building, or find ways of increasing its energy performance or sustainability.
At the same time we are making sure not only that construction workers will be safer on site, but also that the tasks for maintenance staff will be safer in the future. For example, our building designs meet all the requirements for the provision of emergency exits, but for CDM compliance we make sure that applies during every stage of construction or refurbishment. Similarly, we assess whether a building design features any unnecessary elements that are difficult to access, to minimise health and safety risks from carrying out maintenance activities.
Our external work includes auditing the health & safety systems of contractors working for local authorities. We review the content of their health & safety policy documents, and assess whether their intentions are being translated into systems that are actually in use on-site. For this and other safety-related disciplines, we monitor best practice through our membership of the Association for Project Safety.