IN Brief:
- CIOB’s new guide is aimed at organisations commissioning non-domestic building work.
- Its checklist covers competence, compliance arrangements, project information, and building-safety responsibilities.
- Earlier client decisions increasingly influence procurement, regulatory approval, information management, and programme certainty.
The Chartered Institute of Building has published new guidance setting out the responsibilities of organisations commissioning building work under the Building Regulations and Building Safety Act. The free document is aimed particularly at businesses, public bodies, charities, and other non-domestic clients that may procure construction without maintaining a large in-house technical or compliance team.
The guidance is intended to help clients establish whether their proposed work falls within the Building Regulations, understand the duties attached to their role, and put suitable arrangements in place before construction starts. A practical checklist covers the competence of appointed professionals, arrangements for managing compliance, the information needed by the project team, and whether additional building-safety requirements apply to the project.
Those decisions now sit much closer to the start of project planning than many occasional construction clients may expect. Commissioning a designer or contractor does not remove the client’s own responsibilities, while uncertainty over who is responsible for information, compliance, or competence can become considerably more expensive once design, procurement, and programme commitments have been made.
Ayo Allu, chair of CIOB’s Client Steering Group, said clients are “expected to make informed decisions, appoint competent people, provide necessary information”. The guidance does not suggest clients should become technical specialists themselves, but it does make their role in creating the conditions for compliant delivery harder to treat as a purely contractual formality.
Competence is one of the central issues. A client needs sufficient confidence that the organisations and individuals appointed to design and deliver work have the skills, knowledge, experience, and organisational capability appropriate to the project. That requirement affects the way professional teams and contractors are selected, particularly where procurement has traditionally concentrated heavily on price and programme before examining how regulatory responsibilities will actually be managed.
The same applies to information. Construction projects generate drawings, specifications, surveys, approvals, design decisions, product information, inspection records, and changes throughout their life, and the client controls or influences much of the environment in which that information is commissioned and maintained. Incomplete information at the start can travel a surprisingly long way through a project before somebody is finally forced to resolve it.
For higher-risk work, regulatory requirements increase the importance of reaching an appropriate level of design and compliance maturity before construction proceeds. Identifying the status of a project late can affect the building-control route, the preparation of information, professional appointments, and the point at which physical work can begin. A programme assembled on the assumption that those matters can be resolved after mobilisation can therefore carry delay before a contractor has laid a block.
CIOB’s checklist pushes those conversations into the preconstruction period. Clients are encouraged to understand the project’s regulatory position, appoint suitably competent people, establish how compliance will be managed, and make the necessary information available to those delivering the work. None of those steps is particularly exotic, but their timing is important because each can influence consultant scopes, tender documents, design responsibility, and the sequence leading to site commencement.
The changes also alter the commercial consequences of design development. Construction has long relied on resolving details while work progresses, particularly where tender periods are compressed or clients want an early site start. A regulatory system demanding clearer evidence and control of compliance places limits on how far unresolved matters can simply be pushed down the programme without creating additional scrutiny, redesign, or delay.
That does not mean every design decision has to be frozen before procurement, nor that legitimate project changes disappear. It does mean the route for making and recording decisions needs to be understood, with sufficient control to show that compliance has not become collateral damage in a race to preserve the completion date.
The guide is particularly relevant to organisations that build only occasionally. Major developers, contractors, and public estates bodies may employ teams accustomed to navigating regulatory duties, while a manufacturer extending a factory, a charity commissioning a new facility, or an organisation refurbishing premises may encounter the current regime far less frequently. The legal responsibilities do not become lighter simply because construction is not the client’s normal business.
Clearer client understanding should also improve the boundary between statutory duties and contractual delegation. Contracts can allocate services, tasks, and commercial liability, but they do not make every responsibility transferable. A well-structured appointment should therefore identify who is doing what without allowing the commissioning organisation to assume that appointing competent professionals means its own role has ended.
CIOB’s new document provides a relatively compact route into a regulatory system that has become more demanding since the Building Safety Act. Its practical value will be determined before the scaffolding arrives: in whether clients ask the right questions about competence, information, compliance, and project status while there is still enough time to change the plan without changing the completion date.
