Blog Archives
September 2000
Proposed Revisions to the ACoP for the CDM Regulations
The following transcript is reproduced with the permission of Stephen Wright who spoke at our User Forum 28th September 2000. Stephen is a policy section head at the HSE and is responsible for the consultative document regarding the proposed revisions to the ACoP for the CDM Regulations.
Bringing Major Changes To The Construction Health And Safety Law Framework
Some people have been ignoring their CDM responsibilities. Some have been producing mountains of paperwork without adding anything useful as far as health & safety is concerned. To others it is a weight that drags them back in their pursuit of business efficiency. It is just a mass of meaningless paperwork. Leading to frustration.
So there you are then, just relaxing with the comfortable old ACoP and along comes the CD (Consultative Document 161 The Proposed Revisions to ACoP). What do you think of it? I really want to know. In that it still needs a lot of work to get it to a satisfactory state. The only way it will reach a usable end format is if you play your part and share your experience of putting the principles of CDM into practice and avoiding the meaningless bureaucracy!
Make no mistake we must do something. Accident numbers are increasing and so are accident rates. The government expects us to do something to turn things around. One strand of this is to improve the management of construction projects and the new ACoP can play a part in achieving that. We need a lot more though. Please send your thoughts to me on the back of a blank cheque!
John Prescott and Bill Callaghan are planning to host a construction summit early next year where construction companies, including clients, designers, etc., will be expected to commit themselves to practical improvements.
Focus Groups
The focus groups concluded that the problems were not with the Regulations themselves and that most people could live with them - strangely most of the comments we have received so far have involved suggestions that would involve changing the Regs. The one thing we have ruled out!
We wanted everyone to be able to understand their duties and what they had to do comply. We wanted the guidance to be easy to understand and easy to navigate.
In particular we need to provide information to designers about what information they should pass on to contractors, more of this later.
Case Study Material
Practical illustrations of good practice should help people who want to comply, but don't know how to go about it.
We need to cover the full range of construction work. The CD probably tends to assume that construction equates to building. Ideas about ways to broaden the range of work covered (demolition, civil engineering, engineering construction, maintenance) would be welcome.
It is particularly difficult to ensure the competence and resources of those involved in a project without generating a lot of work. We need to strike a balance here - how have we done? Can you provide a better idea or suggest improvements?
Planning & Good Management
Planning is essential to health & safety, but many plans achieve nothing because they are collections of useless, and unused paperwork. How can we make them into useful documents? Will what we have suggested work? Have you any better ideas/ways we can improve?
One reported problem is that designers often don't appreciate the practical implications of their decisions and the health & safety implications. Is that correct? If so do you agree that it is essential that they do?
I have met 2 groups of people as far as planning supervisors are concerned. There are those who want to get rid of them, preferably terminating with extreme prejudice. Then there are the planning supervisors! I certainly want to get rid of those that don't add value as far as health & safety is concerned. Have we struck the right balance? (Since almost 4,000 copies of the CD, 2/3 of the total distributed so far, have been distributed to APS members responses may be biased. If this worries you, make sure you cast your vote!)
What do you think of our definitions, mainly listed in the glossary? Can you improve on them?
I want the good companies to know what is expected of them so that they can achieve it. I want our Inspectors to be able to enforce reasonable standards where people are not inclined to comply voluntarily. Is it? If not how can it be improved on!
I don't want people doing work that does not generate health & safety benefits, worse generating paper that buries the important bits of information. Have we achieved that? How could we improve on what we have done? Text of guidance needs to be amended in view of these changes, but the changes aren't likely to be substantial. These are the main strands we have tried to draw out for 3 of the key duty holders.
This is probably one of the most significant changes. I believe it provides a sensible basis for deciding what should be communicated. What do you think of the definition and examples? Can they, with some further work, provide the information that contractors need - without loads of rubbish piled on top? I also hope designers who identify such significant hazards will reconsider to see if they can be eliminated or reduced.
CDM is about some of the procedural aspects of managing construction work, e.g. choosing competent players, communication, co-operation and planning, but the requirements about actually managing the work are the general requirements of the Health And Safety At Work act. We have the construction management guidance. Is that enough, or do we need some ACoP? If so can we say something useful that covers the whole range of construction work in a few paragraphs?
The way of achieving improved health & safety in construction, in my opinion, is to improve the management of the whole project from conception, though construction, maintenance and through to eventual demolition - I would say from the cradle to the grave, but I want less of this industry's workforce to end up in their graves prematurely. CDM will not ensure good management, but I believe it provides a suitable framework for good management. Work with us to get it right.
DCM - 16 October 2000
Source: Stephen Wright, HSE
User Forum Keynote Speech
The Keynote Speech delivered by Anne Marlow, Director, Ai Solutions Ltd;
A very warm welcome to our user forum. We are delighted to see so many of our regular CDM ToolKit members, many of whom have been with us for a number of years. We are also pleased to welcome some new members. Our team is the same as always, David, Theo, Charles (the I.T. brains) and myself (the non I.T. brain)
As always we want the day to be as relaxed, participative, and informal as possible. We hope that all our forums are interesting and enjoyable but we are particularly excited about this one, as not only do we have Stephen Wright from the HSE with us; Stephen is head of the policy unit responsible for the new ACOP, but we are also launching our new web based service cdmUK.com
The whole background and theme behind this service is improving construction health and safety through better communication. This is exactly what cdmUK.com, our web service is going to offer. Having a CDM community working together, sharing best practice and communicating with other principals and clients over the net. This is the culmination of the vision, which began with the development of the CDM ToolKit™ over six years ago.
We want to form a CDM community that shares best practice, works in partnerships and actively looks for ways to improve construction health and safety These are high ideals, but so many times when dealing with CDM, it seems that conformity to the regulations has grown into an end in itself, when the real objective of improving safety and health has been forgotten. The means has become the end. The tail is wagging the dog.
You can see from the attendee list that you represent every sector of the CDM community in the UK, from the smallest to the largest, from the public to the private. Our largest customer Seeboard is about to expand their network across six sites. Bradford MBC has doubled their installation to include Property Services. Both of these organisations now have their entire internal CDM community committed to the ToolKit. Another major utility is embarking upon a CDM ToolKit™ 2000 pilot project for a potential 500 users.
All of these are major CDM communities in their own right, however they also have third parties/suppliers who participate in the CDM process. Our web-based service can now embrace that entire community, internal and external. The CDM ToolKit™ 2000 will remain the focal point for CDM management with its in depth functionality. What the new web service will bring to ToolKit users is the ability to publish their projects to third parties across the web and to allow all participants to communicate quickly and easily. In this way we are seeking to break down barriers, improve awareness, stifle bureaucracy and improve construction health and safety.
In this way, our dog will be wagging its tail!
Source: Anne Marlow, Ai Solutions Ltd
New Internet Service for the CDM Community
Managing CDM will now be cheaper and easier than before with the launch of an Internet based 'pay-as-you-go' service. For as little as £1 per day project teams and clients can set up easily accessible documentation and keep up to date with the latest changes to a project. cdmUK.com is a new e-commerce service launched by Ai Solutions, it is based on six years experience with their highly successful CDM ToolKit™ 2000, a PC based CDM document management system. cdmUK.com enables clients, architects, planning supervisors and contractors, of both small and large projects, to keep all the relevant information in one place providing easy access across the team. It also helps clients find planning supervisors. Ai Solutions has teamed up with Mouchel, a large engineering consultancy and expert in CDM, to support and manage this service.
The aim is to provide a communication interface between members of project teams, including clients and contractors, together with extensive knowledge bases to help users find their way through the regulations. Once logged on, a user can select from four principal options:
- Ask cdmUK. A search engine which is backed up by a knowledge base on all aspects of the CDM regulations and how to comply with them;
- CDM ToolKit™ Online. A project based document management system;
- CDM DocUstore. A long term storage facility for CDM documents including the health and safety file; and,
- CDM Services. A link to providers of planning supervisory services who meet qualification criteria set down by cdmUK.com. Clients will be able to use this to find planning supervisors whilst for those offering such services it provides a valuable marketing tool.
'Ask cdmUK' helps users identify whether the regulations apply on a project. Also, it helps them to clarify the duties of each role under the regulations and assists with creating the Form 10 Notice of Project as well as the pre-tender health and safety plan.
Templates for these documents and the health and safety file are in Microsoft Word, and can be modified to suit the needs of each project.
The documents are set up and stored on the cdmUK.com server and members of the project team can download and edit them off-line. Once they have been amended they are sent back to the server. Other documents, such as minutes of project meetings and drawings, can also be checked into the system and downloaded. Confidentiality is protected through a system of security passes. This enables project leaders to control who has access to the project information, and who can alter documents or merely read them.
Through CDM ToolKit™ Online, users can access documents via a menu that lists the projects they have access to. A bulletin board enables team members to post urgent information. The system also holds contact details on all project team members in an updateable database. A library will also be available for organisations to store their key documents in.
cdmUK.com benefits from an extensive knowledge base that Ai Solutions has been developing since it first launched the CDM ToolKit™ on floppy disk in 1995. The knowledge base provides much advice on roles, responsibilities and subjects such as risk management, for example taking users through a risk assessment step by step. It is regularly updated, thus being of immediate benefit to users of the service.
When the project has finished, all of the documents can be stored on the cdmUK.com server indefinitely. This provides ready accessibility to the information and removes the need for physical storage space that can create not only a physical storage problem, but become increasing costly with time, particularly on larger projects.
Tariffs for using the service are structured so that the more it is used the cheaper it becomes. For occasional users, organisations are charged £1 per page to access Ask cdmUK, and for CDM ToolKit Online, it is £1 per project, per day, per user. However, organisations wishing to commit to long term usage are offered discounted rates per month and per year. Long-term storage in DocUstore will be even cheaper.
This service is easy to use, and management of the project information over the web will enhance communication enabling everyone to retrieve the information whether they are in their office or out on site. With the government proposing to tighten up the penalties for flouting the CDM regulations, all those involved in CDM including Clients will benefit from the greater communication potential that such a system as this offers.
For further details see
http://www.cdmUK.com or contact Ai Solutions on 01525 850 080
Word Count 827
Author note
Alastair Blyth is an architect, consultant and writer specialising in briefing and building performance. He writes for the construction industry press and was an editor on the Architects' Journal with special responsibility for the architectural practice section. He now runs a research-based consultancy advising construction clients on briefing, building performance and project team performance.
This article is also available in the following formats:
- Adobe Acrobat (PDF) (1916 kB)
- ZIPped PDF (84 kB)
Source: Alastair Blythe
cdmUK.com
"Mouchel, the major consulting engineering group, and Ai Solutions, developers of the CDM ToolKit™ 2000 software, have teamed together to provide a new e-commerce service for everyone involved in the HSE's Construction (Design & Management) Regulations. The new service will use a newly developed version of the CDM ToolKit™ currently installed throughout the UK with many local authorities, large corporates including Mouchel and other organisations providing planning supervisory services. The new service will be delivered through a new company, cdmUK.com which will 'go live' on 2nd October 2000 following a month of testing and evaluation by Mouchel, Ai Solutions and selected customers.
There will be 4 key elements to the new service:
- Ask cdmUK - a powerful search engine into all matters concerning the regulations and how to comply with them
- CDM ToolKit™ Online - a project based document management system for CDM
- DocUstore - a long term storage facility for CDM documents including the Health & Safety File and Operations and Maintenance Manual
- CDM Services - a link to service providers who sign up to the cdmUK.com Quality Mark for planning supervisory and associated CDM services
Further information is available from the online site cdmUK.com."
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