Principal Designer Role 

  • Are you running a busy design practice but need to ‘do’ Principal Design as an ‘add-on?’

  • Do you want to offer a rounded service but don’t have the time to deliver Principal Design duties?

  • Are you unsure about what the duties of Principal Designer are and need help to fulfill them?

The CDM regulations (CDM 15) introduced the role of Principal Designer, which partly replaces the previous CDM Coordinator duties. The Principal Designer is responsible for the planning, monitoring, and coordination aspects of designing health and safety into a construction project.  This includes considerations of the principles of prevention for:

Design | Construction | Handover | In use | Demolition

The Principal Designer is stated as being “the individual or business in control of the Pre-construction phase” and will usually, but not always, be passed to the lead designer of the construction project during the early stages such as RIBA 0 – 2.


It is common for Principal Designer duties to pass to the Design and Build Principal Contractor following the award of the building contract.

 
 

Our Experience

We have experience in delivering several projects throughout England and Wales:

  • Commercial refurbishment project in Liverpool city center for the international food chain.

  • Major commercial refurbishment project for flagship retail store in Manchester.

  • Residential conversion project in Salford.

  • Biomass fuel civil engineering projects in Liverpool and Immingham.

  • Residential apartments in Liverpool.

  • Refurbishment of the first-class lounge in Glasgow train station.

Our experience in health and safety services has included various technical and high-risk areas of design planning. Explosive Atmospheres, Transport tunnel beneath the River Mersey, former chemical plant grounds, built-up areas, and live environments have all been served by us.

 
 

How Better Safety can help

We can fulfill the duties of Principal Designer for your practice. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recognises many Principal Designers may not have the necessary skills or experience within their practice to take on various projects and could choose to appoint an external organisation to support them in carrying out their duties.

We have extensive experience in supporting principal designers with the new CDM 15 requirements.
Our projects range from Major Civils works with a value of £320 Million to Minor Repair works with a value of £10,000.
We apply our Three Core Principles to every project we undertake:

TIME | COST | QUALITY

 
 

Principal Designer Fees

Depending upon the complexity and experience of the Client, fees will vary greatly. Some organisations provide a “retained service fee” for larger organisations with multiple projects. Others will provide a fee based on the percentage of the project cost. At Better Safety, we prefer to take a risk-based approach. Our Principal Design Advisor service aims to support architects, engineers, builders, and client duty-holders based on their understanding of risk and application of principles of prevention throughout the project lifecycle.