Health and safety legislation requires the employer to ensure the competence of their workforce and for the employee to assure they are competent to undertake all aspects of the job function.
It is a significant breach of health and safety law to engage someone / a company that is not demonstrably competent, as is accepting work for which you are not competent to undertake.
This competence requirement is included in CMD2015 Regulations and extended when dealing with higher risk buildings under the Building Safety Act 2022.
Due to legislative changes to the construction industry arising from the Grenfell Tower disaster, the UK Government created a general competency standard for the built environment industry – PAS8670:2022. This standard sets out the general skills, knowledge and experience expected to be demonstrated by persons active in the build environment.
The PAS8670:2022 general competency standard has been applied to four specific duty holders;
- Principal Designers working on non-higher risk buildings (a CDM2015 PD)
- Principal Designers working on higher-risk buildings (a BSA:2022 PD)
- Principal Contractors
- Building Safety Managers.
Accordingly, there are three BSI standards
- PAS8671 for Principal Designers (which incorporates CDM2015 and BSA2022 PD’s)
- PAS8672 for Principal Contractors
- PAS8673 for Building Safety Managers
These standards have been created for independent competency assessment, i.e. they are not designed for individuals, companies and employers to perform their own competency assessment – this is self-assessment which the UK Government regards as insufficient and inadequate.
It is vital that individuals and companies are independently validated to these standards, to ensure their competencies are suitable and to provide a means of proving that competencies have been checked, both to satisfy legal duties and to demonstrate compliance in the case of regulator investigation.
The AoCDM have therefore created three registers, one for Principal Designers, one for Principal Contractors and the other for building safety managers.
Application to appear on these registers is a blend of answering set questions and examples of work matched to the PAS8671/2/3 standards. Test results and the submitted work is then assessed by one of our qualified assessors, operating to independently verified standards.
Our assessment processes conform to ISO standards specifically created for independent assessment.
If minimum criteria are met and/or exceeded, then the individual / company is included in our registers at the appropriate level.
Our registers are freely available to anyone who wishes to either check the competencies of their existing workforce / contractors, or for those seeking individuals / companies for nominated construction project work.
Please see the PD/PC/BSM registers for details on how to apply, assessment criteria and competency levels.