CDM 2015 ten years on – are duty holders really compliant?

The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 have now been in force for a decade. The statistics suggest that large parts of the industry still haven’t caught up.

CDM 2015 was intended to be a step change: clearer responsibilities, a more prominent role for the client in managing health and safety, and critically, the introduction of the Principal Designer as the duty holder responsible for coordinating pre-construction health and safety risk.

A decade in, the picture is mixed. The HSE’s own research into the Principal Designer role, published in 2023, found that “the intended objectives of the role are not being fully realised”. Despite a welcome reduction in fatalities in 2024/25 — down to 35 from 51 the previous year — construction still accounted for 28% of all worker deaths across UK industry. Falls from height remained the leading cause, responsible for more than half of all construction fatalities over the last five years.

Where compliance is still falling short

The HSE’s prosecution data tells its own story. In the 12 months to early 2024, there were 17 prosecutions under CDM 2015 alone, a significant increase from previous years. Of those, 14 resulted in financial penalties. Several cases involved entirely foreseeable failures: inadequate pre-construction planning, poor contractor competency assessments, and design changes made without any safety review.

One pattern appears repeatedly: clients who appoint a Principal Designer as a contractual box-tick, without ensuring that the person has the skills, authority, and access to the design process to actually discharge the role. The CDM Principal Designer is not an inspector after the fact — it is an active coordinator throughout design and pre-construction. Without that proactive involvement, risks are identified late, if at all.

Appointing a Principal Designer is a legal requirement. Appointing one who can actually do the job is where compliance starts. – Bradley Taylor, Divisional Director

The client’s liability is often underestimated

Under CDM 2015, clients have explicit duties that cannot be delegated away. They must ensure suitable arrangements are in place for managing the project, appoint duty holders who are competent, and ensure sufficient time and resources are provided for each stage. A £410,000 fine was handed down in 2023 after a child was injured when a tile fell from a hotel roof during refurbishment, with the client, Principal Designer and Principal Contractor all being convicted.

That case is instructive because the failure was not exceptional. The scaffolding was inadequate. The risk assessment was insufficient. The duty holders had not properly collaborated. These are precisely the failings that CDM 2015 was designed to prevent; and they are still occurring regularly.

What a proactive approach looks like

Wakemans provides Principal Designer and CDM Advisor services across all sectors, led by Bradley Taylor and the health and safety team. The approach is proactive and hands-on: coordinating design risk management from the concept stage, conducting competency assessments for all duty holders, and providing ongoing oversight through to handover. For clients who require a more structured and embedded approach, we have designed and implemented bespoke CDM compliance frameworks and management tools, built around the specific characteristics of their projects, portfolios and internal governance structures. These are not “off-the-shelf”, generic checklists. They are purpose-built systems that allow our clients to monitor compliance status, identify risk, and demonstrate due diligence in a way that is meaningful, rather than merely documentary.

As described below, we can also provide formal CDM compliance reporting at board level, giving executive teams and directors a clear, regular picture of their obligations, their current compliance position and any areas of exposure requiring attention. In an era where the Building Safety Act has extended personal liability to those at the top of the duty-holder chain, that visibility is not a courtesy. It is a governance necessity.

At Wakemans, we believe that compliance without understanding is just paperwork. Our approach has always been to educate clients at a practical level, not simply helping them meet a requirement, but ensuring they genuinely understand why that requirement exists, what it protects against, and what the real-world consequences of failing to meet it can be. A tick in a box means nothing if the person ticking it doesn’t know what sits behind it. We do. And we make sure our clients do too.

CDM in practice

Wakemans is appointed as Pre-Construction Principal Designer and Construction Phase Health & Safety Advisor across several clients’ full pipeline of construction projects, working alongside whichever Employer’s Agent team is in place on each scheme. In practice, that means delivering the full suite of CDM obligations across every live project: Pre-Construction Information, Construction Phase Plan assessments, F10 notifications, monthly site H&S audits, attendance at progress meetings and performance monitoring, alongside H&S File and O&M Manual reviews. It is a genuinely embedded role, not a consultancy appointment that operates at arm’s length.

Beyond the project level, Wakemans has designed and written many clients’ CDM procedures and standardised documentation – a suite of tools that are now used consistently across the entire development pipeline. CDM compliance is tracked through a bespoke platform that Wakemans led on developing, to which all compliance documents are uploaded and which generates a live percentage compliance score across every active construction project. Either Bradley Taylor, Divisional Director or a senior member of the team attends Indurent’s monthly SHE meetings and reports directly to the directors on CDM compliance status, giving leadership the board-level visibility and accountability that the Building Safety Act increasingly demands from those at the top of the duty holder chain.

Ten years on from CDM 2015, the obligations are well understood in principle. The gap is in putting it into practice, and for clients who want to close that gap, the starting point is appointing a Principal Designer with the genuine capacity to do the role justice. As described above, Wakemans provides expert CDM Principal Designer and CDM Advisor services to a range of clients. Contact Bradley Taylor’s team to discuss your project’s requirements at wakemans.com/expertise/principal-designer