Construction Management near you

The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 apply to domestic projects, and regulation 7 is the provision that decides who carries the client duties. It provides that where the client is a domestic client, the duties in regulations 4(1) to (7) and 6 must be carried out by the contractor for a project where there is only one contractor; by the principal contractor for a project where there is more than one contractor; or by the principal designer where there is a written agreement that the principal designer will fulfil those duties.

Regulation 7(2) covers the case where nobody has been appointed. If a domestic client fails to make the appointments required by regulation 5, the designer in control of the pre-construction phase of the project is the principal designer, and the contractor in control of the construction phase of the project is the principal contractor. Regulation 7(3) then disapplies regulation 5(3) and (4) to a domestic client, so a householder who has not made appointments does not thereby become the principal designer or principal contractor themselves.

Our whole-house renovation guide explains how this works on an ordinary project with one builder. What construction management changes is the arithmetic. If you hold contracts with a groundworker, a carpenter, an electrician and a plasterer, your project plainly has more than one contractor, so the duties go to the principal contractor - and if no principal contractor has been appointed, they go to whichever contractor is in control of the construction phase. On a genuine construction management arrangement, that question deserves a clear answer in writing before anyone starts, because the construction manager may or may not be a contractor at all.

Health and safety is not the only regime with dutyholders in it. Since 1 October 2023, Part 2A of the Building Regulations 2010 has required building work in England to be planned, managed and monitored so that it complies, with principal designers and principal contractors appointed in writing where there is more than one contractor, and with an express competence requirement on anyone carrying out building work or design work. Our project management guide sets out how those duties fall on a domestic project.

The important point for construction management is that the two regimes ask the same structural question and can be answered inconsistently. It is entirely possible to end up with one firm treated as principal contractor for health and safety purposes and a different arrangement assumed for the building regulations, which is exactly the sort of gap that surfaces when something goes wrong. Naming both sets of roles in the same document, at the same time, is a five-minute job at the start and an expensive argument later.

Building control itself does not change with the procurement route. The application still goes to a local authority building control service or a registered building control approver in England and Wales, the inspections still have to be booked at the right stages, and the completion certificate still has to be obtained. Under construction management, that responsibility does not sit inside a main contractor's programme any more, so somebody has to be explicitly given it.

Under a main contract, if the plasterer walks off, that is the builder's problem: the builder has to find another and bear the delay. Under construction management, it is your problem, because your contract was with the plasterer. That single difference explains most of what goes wrong on domestic construction management projects, and it is why the route is sensible for an experienced client with a long project and unwise for a household doing this once.

The second risk is the gap between packages. Every trade contract has edges, and the work that belongs to nobody - the bit of blockwork under the door threshold, the duct that had to pass through somebody else's wall - lands on the client to resolve and to pay for. A good construction manager spends much of their time closing those gaps in advance; a weak one discovers them on site.

The third is cash flow and insolvency. Paying trades directly means paying several businesses on different cycles, and it means that a trade going under mid-package leaves you with an incomplete element and no main contractor standing behind it. Retentions, clear payment terms, and not paying significantly ahead of the work done are the ordinary protections, and they need to be in each trade contract rather than assumed.

A construction manager's fee reflects how much coordination the job needs and for how long: the number of trade packages, the length of the programme and the frequency of site attendance, whether the design is complete or still developing as packages are let, whether the property is occupied during the work, how constrained the site is for access, storage and deliveries, and whether the service includes tendering and payment checking or only supervision. The trade packages themselves are priced separately and directly, which is the whole point of the route and also the reason the total is harder to fix at the outset than under a main contract.

LokalMatch makes the introduction and nothing else. Set out the project once, with your postcode, the stage the design has reached and how you would like the work procured, and construction managers and contractors covering your area will be in touch. There is no cost to homeowners; the pros pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not build or manage anything, does not set fees or prices, and does not vet, rank or recommend any business that responds, so satisfying yourself about their track record and insurance is your part of the process.