Building Safety Act Dutyholders: Who Signs What

The email comes from the client's solicitor and it is two lines long. The appointment documents are being finalised, and they need to know which of the Building Regulations dutyholder roles your company is taking on this project and who in your business will be named against it. There is a signature block waiting, a date on it, and no explanation of what it commits you to.

What's Actually Being Asked

Since October 2023 the Building Regulations in England have carried a set of dutyholder and competence duties of their own, introduced by the 2023 amendment regulations made under the Building Act 1984 as amended by the Building Safety Act 2022. They name five roles: the client, the principal designer, the principal contractor, and every other designer and contractor working on the job.

Where there is more than one contractor on a project, or it is reasonably foreseeable that there will be, the client must appoint a principal designer and a principal contractor in writing. Where there is only one contractor, that contractor carries the principal contractor duties with no appointment made, and where more than one designer works on that project the designers must agree in writing which of them carries the principal designer duties, and give the client a copy. A commercial client that makes no appointment does not escape the roles; it has to fulfil those duties itself until somebody is appointed to them.

Domestic clients sit differently, which matters on work commissioned by individual homeowners. A domestic client's own duties pass to the contractor, or to the principal contractor or principal designer by written agreement, and where no appointment is made the designer in control of the design phase and the contractor in control of the construction phase take the principal roles by default. The duties do not disappear. They land on the businesses doing the work.

The thing that trips people up first is the names. A principal designer and a principal contractor already exist under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015, and the same organisation often holds both. The CDM roles are about managing health and safety risk, the principal designer across the pre-construction phase and the principal contractor across construction. The building regulations roles are about planning, managing and monitoring the work so that what gets built complies with the Building Regulations. They are not the same appointment, although a client may certify in writing that the CDM appointee is treated as appointed for building regulations purposes as well. Either way the two sets of duties stay separate, and a letter that names only the CDM role leaves the building regulations position unrecorded.

Scope trips people up next. These duties apply to building work in England generally, not only to higher-risk buildings. A project well under the height and storey thresholds still has a client, a chain of designers and contractors, and somebody carrying the principal designer and principal contractor duties, however they came to hold them. Only the narrow list of minor works in the regulations takes a client outside the framework altogether. Higher-risk work then adds a layer on top: the gateways, the golden thread, formal change control during construction and mandatory occurrence reporting, set out in the procedural regulations made in 2023.

Then there is competence. A request to take one of these roles must not be accepted unless the person meets the competence requirement for it, and a person must not act as principal designer or principal contractor without it. For an individual that is framed as the skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours needed to carry out the role; for an organisation it is the organisational capability to do so. The regulations go as far as describing the behaviours expected, which include declining work beyond your capability and refusing work that would not comply. That judgement sits with the person signing, not with whoever sent the letter.

One more distinction is worth keeping straight, because it causes a great deal of confusion. The accountable person and principal accountable person are occupation-phase roles for higher-risk buildings that are finished and in use. They are not construction dutyholders, and the Act as passed does not require a separately appointed building safety manager alongside them. If a contract hands you a role from the wrong phase, resolve it before signature rather than after.

This is how the framework is structured, not advice on any particular appointment. Where a role or its scope is unclear, that is a question for the parties and their advisers, which is why the answer is worth recording.

The Evidence That Answers It

Who signs what has a fairly short answer, and almost every part of it produces a record somebody may ask for later:

• The appointment, or the agreement that stands in for it. Where the client appoints in writing, keep the document, its date and the scope it describes. Where the roles arrive by default on a single-contractor job, or by agreement between designers, that is the record instead. Keep it distinct from the CDM appointment even when the two arrive in one envelope.
• The acceptance, and the competence behind it. Accepting a role carries with it a position that you meet the competence requirement. The evidence is the named individuals, their skills, knowledge and experience against this scope of work, and the organisational capability standing behind them, dated to when the appointment was accepted.
• The role map. Who holds each role at each tier, and where your organisation sits in it. A firm engaged as one of several contractors carries contractor duties, but a scope procured direct by a client can put that same firm into a principal role without anyone saying so out loud.
• The gateway documents, on higher-risk work. An application for building control approval has to be granted before construction begins, the client is responsible for it, and the principal appointments must already be in place before it is submitted. The procedural regulations set out what it carries: a competence declaration, a construction control plan, a change control plan, a mandatory occurrence reporting plan, a fire and emergency file and a building regulations compliance statement are among them, and each is fed by the people doing the work.
• Change and occurrence records during construction. Higher-risk work runs a formal change control regime, and the principal designer and principal contractor carry mandatory occurrence reporting duties. Both leave a trail, and both depend on information travelling up from the people on the job.
• The completion signatures. At the end of higher-risk work the completion certificate application is signed by the client, confirming that to the best of their knowledge the building as built complies, and it carries a compliance declaration from the principal contractor and principal designer confirming they have fulfilled their duties. Neither is signed comfortably without the underlying evidence in place.
• The handover. Information is passed on at the end of construction so the building can be registered and managed in occupation. What you handed over, when, and to whom, is itself a record.

Why the Spreadsheet Version Fails

Everything in that list exists in most businesses, and almost none of it is in the same place. The appointment is in the contracts folder, under a project name that changed after the deal. The competence evidence is a training matrix that was accurate the week it was built, listing a team that has since turned over. The role map is not written down at all; it lives in the understanding of a commercial manager and a project director who mostly agree. Then the job runs for two years. The person who accepted the appointment on the strength of their own experience leaves, the scope grows by variation into work nobody assessed competence against, and the declaration at the end asks somebody to stand behind all of it. The failure is not that the records never existed. It is that assembling them into an answer takes far longer than the request allows, and by the time it is assembled it describes a project that has moved on.

Keeping It Provable

The alternative is to treat the appointment as the start of a record rather than a piece of correspondence. When the role is accepted, the acceptance, the named individuals, the competence evidence behind them and the scope it covers go into the project record, anchored to the building. As the work proceeds, the decisions, the site evidence and the changes attach to the same record, and when the scope moves, the competence question is asked again rather than assumed to have survived it. Built that way, a declaration at the end is a summary of what you already hold. Built the other way, it is a signature over a gap.

The Monday Checklist

1. List your live projects and write down which building regulations role your company holds on each. Where the answer is not certain, that is the first job.
2. For each one, find the appointment, default position or designers' agreement that put you there, and check whether the document you hold is a building regulations appointment, a CDM appointment, or a letter that assumes they are the same thing.
3. Name the individuals actually carrying each role today, not the ones named at tender, and put the date next to each name.
4. Hold the competence evidence for those individuals against this scope of work, and note where it is thin before somebody else does.
5. Check whether any scope has grown by variation into work nobody assessed competence for, and reopen it.
6. On higher-risk jobs, confirm who feeds the change control and mandatory occurrence reporting routes from your side, and how.
7. Agree in writing who owns the completion evidence for your scope, and start collecting it now rather than at practical completion.

Where BrieXO Fits

BrieXO's FIELD bundle keeps daily site records, inspection and QA workflows, photo evidence, competence records and recorded decisions in one living record, anchored to the building, so the evidence behind an appointment accumulates alongside the work instead of being reassembled when a declaration is due. Design and commercial modules are on the roadmap. It supports your dutyholder duties; it doesn't discharge them, and nothing in it decides who holds a role or whether anyone is competent for it. How that record maps to the Act is set out on our Building Safety Act compliance software page.

Related reading:whether your project is in scope in the first place, who evidences what, package by package, and what Gateway 2 asks the supply chain to produce.

George Sfica is a senior design manager at a specialist façade contractor, with 23 years in manufacturing and construction, eleven of them in façades and external envelopes, spanning fabrication, installation and design management, an MSc in Façade Engineering and an IFE Level 2 Certificate in Passive Fire Protection. He is the founder of BrieXO.