The increasing focus on managing out health and safety risk in design is to be welcomed (BSj 05/05). But I fear that some initiatives in this area will not make significant progress unless the design team, and process, is fully integrated.

As it is, consultant designers, contractor designers and manufacturer designers are not talking to each other. Many designers, in fact, are unaware of their duties under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations. Where the major causal factor in an accident is linked to design, a client is at risk from litigation. If it can be shown that an integrated design team would have avoided the accident, the injured party could bring a common law negligence action against the client.

If designers are to have a robust dialogue and act as a team to preplan the project and better manage the design process to minimise health and safety risk, each party needs to be better equipped to engage in this process. The Specialist Engineering Alliance – an alliance of CIBSE, the Association for Consultancy and Engineering, the Specialist Engineering Contractors Group, the Federation of Environmental Trade Associations and BSRIA – is keen to address this.

The alliance is currently engaged in a project to develop a common terminology for building services design and define activities that make up the design process. This is close to completion. It is proposed that this work should be further developed so that the health and safety implications for each design activity will be identified within a checklist, to be used by each member of the design team.

This project will have a number of benefits.

  • It will enable effective management of health and safety risks in design interfaces.
  • It will encourage a productive dialogue between the parties delivering design.
  • It should facilitate early involvement of all parties contributing to the design process.

Health and safety should be not be regarded as an unnecessary intrusion in the design process. There should be a debate among all designers about health and safety risks – after all, having a dialogue about such risks often leads to innovation in design that could also produce commercial benefits for the end user.

Professor Rudi Klein, chief executive of the Specialist Engineering Contractors Group

Source

Building Sustainable Design