Building Safety Act Consult launch Principal Designer services

Following demand, we are expanding our service offering and today we are launching our Principal Designer services.

We believe that the Principal Designer role needs to cease being a box ticking exercise as it is often currently viewed and become a proactive, collaborative role where the Principal Designer challenges and appraises the design.

With experience managing multiple higher-risk buildings (HRBs), our team has a wealth of experience delivering building control and design management services on HRBs, providing us with the knowledge and experiences to support our Clients to provide Principal Designer Services.

Our Approach to the Principal Designer Role

The incoming building safety regime has been aligned to the role and responsibilities brought in under CDM 2015. We understand that the Building Safety Act and CDM 2015 must be considered together to deliver health and safety on projects and programmes in the principal designer role, whilst constructing a building that is compliant with the building safety regulations and meets functional requirements.

As principal designers, we will make early consideration of the design and health and safety coordinating with all the project team and duty holders to make sure health and building safety is integrated into building designs from conception. We will use our experience on complex construction projects to identify risks in design and support project teams to design for compliance or manage the risk during construction and occupation.

For us, the principal designer is a proactive role at the centre of the project team who communicates and works with the project team to design safe buildings which achieve compliance with the regulations. We will take a collaborative approach to the principal designer role and we will support our clients to procure and deliver their project with building safety at the core.

Our Principal Designer Service

We deliver our Principal Designer Services in accordance with British Standard PAS 8671:2022 which is the framework for competence for Principal Designers.

Our service is specifically tailored for us to deliver the Principal Designer role for higher-risk buildings. Our core scope will be to:

• Plan, manage and monitor the design work during the building work
• Take all reasonable steps to ensure the design work carried out by them and anyone under their control is planned, managed and monitored so that the design is such that, if built, it would comply with all relevant requirements of the building regulations
• Ensure that they, and all those working on the project, co-operate, communicate and co-ordinate their work with the client, the Principal Contractor, and other designers and contractors
• Liaise with the Principal Contractor and share information relevant to the building work
• Assist the client in providing information to others
• Work with the client to deliver a collaborative approach to procurement and put building safety at the centre of the procurement process

We approach all of our roles with collaboration and with the aim of bringing project teams together to achieve the project aims whilst completing construction design and works safely.

We will work with the design team to get the best out of their specialisms to deliver a design to mitigate building safety risks wherever possible. Equally, we are prepared to constructively challenge the design team and contractors using our knowledge and experience of delivering building control services on higher-risk buildings if we feel something can be done better or is not right.

Principal Designer Services – Why us?

We will work independently from the design team but in a collaborative manner to monitor the design. We will provide more interrogation of the design to check compliance with the Building Regulations.

We believe that the Principal Designer role needs to cease being a box ticking exercise as it is often currently viewed and become a proactive, collaborative role where the Principal Designer challenges and appraises the design.

All our team members have a wealth of experience delivering building control and design management services on higher-risk buildings. Our team have experience managing design teams to deliver and review designs which mitigate and are conscious of building safety risks including fire and structural risks.

We have experience leading health and safety on some of the UK’s biggest construction projects (as pictured). All our team members are chartered industry professionals with a combined 200 years' experience leading construction projects.

Our team of building control professionals have all been through in-depth training on the incoming Building Safety Act and the associated legislation and regulations, meaning they can bring extensive knowledge on how it impacts the projects and programmes.

For more information, a quotation or for our service brochure, contact Joshua Waterman or Building Safety Act Consult .

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