Five years is ample time to judge whether CDM has delivered on its promises, or simply fulfilled the sceptics’ expectations. In that time, several cycles of projects have been planned, designed, built and occupied according to the principles of CDM. However, it is unlikely that any have reached the final stage in the life-cycle CDM was intended to manage: demolition.
The Health and Safety Executive, charged with overseeing and implementing CDM legislation, has also decided that the five-year anniversary marks a convenient breathing space. It is currently reviewing the Approved Code of Practice that accompanies and amplifies the legislation, and hopes a new code will be in force early next year. Next year, too, it will start a full review of the regulations themselves – a task made more urgent by a recent Court of Appeal judgement which concluded that the regulations were not as legally watertight as had been supposed.
So what feedback will the HSE be getting from the construction firms that were both beneficiaries and guinea pigs for CDM? The industry recognises that CDM has delivered important intangibles, such as raised awareness of health and safety both on site and in the boardroom. But in tangible terms – accident statistics, working time lost to accidents and hazards in completed buildings – the data is either inconclusive, anecdotal or has never been collated in the first place.
Before 1 April 1995, contractors bore the greatest responsibility for health and safety under the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act. The CDM Regulations spread responsibility more evenly among the members of the project team: architects and engineers are obligated to “design out” possible safety risks so that they never reach site, and clients are bound by law to ensure that this is done. They also have to disclose safety-related information to their designers and contractors.
Bother with bureaucracy
To act as their safety eyes, ears and co-ordinators, clients have to appoint a “planning supervisor”, a role that could either be grafted on to the terms of appointment of the architect, quantity surveyor, project manager or contractor, or could be awarded to a third party. Under CDM, planning supervisors soon began to be seen as an added expense for clients, the chief source of a blizzard of paperwork for contractors, or officious scoutmasters telling architects that their designs were full of tripping hazards.
Soundings from contractors, consultants and clients, however, suggest that CDM has proved to be less of a bureaucratic burden than was originally feared. “Without doubt, it is now totally integrated,” says Bill Munn, training and safety manager of Midlands contractor Thomas Vale, in a representative comment. Paul Boden, director for development management at Jones Lang LaSalle, feels that CDM has added to his fee bill, but that the costs are generally containable.
The consensus on the overall impact, however, does not disguise persistent grumbles about CDM in practice. Brian Law is the chief executive of the Association of Planning Supervisors, a trade body for nearly 5000 CDM professionals. “We still see the major problems: late appointments of planning supervisors, designers ducking their responsibilities and contractors who are still expected to provide reams of pre-qualification paperwork. Five years on, there is still some disappointment,” he says.
Elsewhere in the industry, on the other hand, it is still the planning supervisors themselves and their lack of consistency that are the focus of concern. “We’ve had experience of planning supervisors with vastly different roles,” comments Richard Newman, a partner in Birmingham-based architectural practice Bryant Priest Newman. “People come from different backgrounds, they have different biases, they’ve been on different courses. If I had a criticism of the legislation, it is that perhaps it needs to be more prescriptive.” Suzannah Thursfield, the Construction Confederation’s health and safety director, agrees that roles should be clarified: “We are pushing for clearer guidance that CDM is not about paperwork.”
Kevin Myers, the HSE’s chief inspecting officer for construction and the man responsible for enforcing CDM, appears to have heeded these points. “There is an element of over-bureaucracy, which isn’t at the instigation of the HSE. It is people trying to cover their backs. We want designers to design safely, not produce a two-inch thick risk assessment afterwards. The new Approved Code of Practice will spell things out more, so that duties are clearer.”
Does it help?
But smoother-than-expected integration, and the prospect of a less ambiguous code of practice, are hardly virtues in themselves if CDM has not achieved what it set out to achieve: to deliver a safer working environment for employees operating plant, digging trenches or maintaining finished buildings.
The statistics from the Health and Safety Executive paint an unclear picture. In 1994-95, the year prior to CDM, there were 88 fatalities in the industry and 2627 major non-fatal injures. Four years on – the latest for which statistics are available – fatalities had dropped to 70, but the number of notified major accidents had actually risen to 4619.
A fatality rate that still equates to more than one death a week and a surge in the number of accidents does not look favourable for CDM. The HSE prefers to measure the incidence rate per 100 000 workers. But even on this measure, the figures appear inconclusive: the fatality rate has fallen for employees from 6.9 per 100 000 to 4.4, but stayed stable for the self-employed. The incidence rate of major accidents for employees went up from 221.2 to 394.6, although this is partially balanced by the fall among the self-employed from 97.2 to 54.8.
The HSE argues that the apparent increase in non-fatal accidents is actually part of the CDM success story. Five years ago, it claims, under-reporting of accidents in the industry was rife. “We carried out independent research. In 1994-95, we found that 46% of accidents were reported. By 1997-98 it had increased to 55%,” notes the HSE’s Myers, adding that the definition of a major accident was also widened in 1996-97. “The overall picture is a reduction in the number of accidents, although the published statistics do not reflect that”.
In this light, Myers believe that accident statistics are a fair yardstick of CDM’s success. But as the Construction Confederation’s Thursfield points out, accident figures should form part of a wider statistical picture. “You can look at the number of people exposed to asbestos, or services strikes, or whether projects are brought in on time. Sometimes the stuff we don’t measure is more important than what we do measure,” she argues.
Law of the APS supports Thursfield’s view that CDM’s overall impact is notoriously difficult to measure: his organisation has tried and failed to devise suitable key performance indicators for health and safety. He notes that accidents that do not result in reportable injuries can have a cost and productivity impact on the project that is simply buried in the final account and never shows up in statistics. He adds: “The telling point will be five or 10 years down the line, when the maintenance crews come along. These are the kind of issues that aren’t reported on.”
Several contractors and planning supervisors have taken up his point. “Now, architects acknowledge issues like space around plant, safety lines to get on the roof and cleaning procedures to get on the roof of tall buildings,” comments George Inglis, an associate director in MPM Capita’s planning supervision department.
Nick Scruby, a planning supervisor for the management and industry group at WS Atkins, agrees that improved maintenance safety is a CDM success story, but fears this is only because maintenance issues provide an easy target. “It is easier to focus on maintenance issues than it is to design safer buildings and monitor how they are built on site. More people have an interest in it.”
Policing safety
Construction sites are always going to be dangerous places, but a visible presence from the HSE’s inspectors might help on-site safety monitoring. The HSE’s enforcement strategy has largely been to target specific risks – such as roof lights – respond to accidents and complaints, and monitor known CDM offenders: it investigates as many as 80% of the complaints it receives, and in the past five years, there have been 98 prosecutions under the CDM regulations. Fifty-four were against clients. But the strategy is essentially reactive. It hardly amounts to an awareness-raising blitz.
Myers argues that, with 1.4 million employees in the industry, “the primary responsibility for ensuring health and safety lies with the people that create the risks, not the HSE. Our job is to regulate the people who abuse the system.” Law of the APS, and indeed most people contacted for this article, have sympathy with that view. “It’s like speeding. The police cannot be everywhere at once. It is up to the industry to self-police.” Law remarks.
Five years on, the industry appears to have come to terms with CDM, and has incorporated its risk-reducing message in the same way as it has taken on board partnering, supply-chain management and key performance indicators. In fact, CDM appears to be increasingly aligned with other efficiency initiatives. That is probably the best thing that could happen. Viewed in isolation, its successes or shortcomings are never going to be clear cut.
