Last edited 25 Sep 2020

Planning supervisor

The role of ‘planning supervisor’ was created by the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations (CDM Regulations) in 1994 which came into force on 31 March 1995. The regulations were introduced to ensure that health and safety issues are properly considered during a project’s development so that the risk of harm to those who have to build, use and maintain structures is reduced.

The planning supervisor role was intended to be a supervisory one, ensuring that the regulations were complied with:

Ensuring designers co-operated and avoided and reduced risks.
Ensuring that the Health and Safety Plan and Health and Safety File were prepared.
Advising the client about the adequacy and competence of designers and contractors.
Advising the client about the Health and Safety Plan.
Ensuring the project was notified to the Health and Safety Executive.

However, when the CDM Regulations were revised in 2007, planning supervisors were scrapped and replaced with a new role, ‘CDM Co-ordinator’.

The CDM Co-ordinator was intended to take a more active role in the project, actually co-ordinating health and safety issues and performing tasks themselves rather than just advising or ensuring that others perform their duties. This more active role included:

Advising the client about their duties.
Facilitating good communication between the client, designers and contractors.
Notifying the Health and Safety Executive.
Co-ordinating health and safety aspects of design.
Providing, or ensuring that the client provides relevant pre-construction information.
Preparing or compiling the health and safety file.

See CDM Co-ordinator for more information.

However, the 2007 CDM Regulations were substantially revised in 2015. These revisions saw the role of CDM Co-ordinator transferred to a Principal Designer and Principal Contractor to try to embed it better into the project team. See CDM 2015 for more information.