Project Management near you

Part 2A was inserted into the Building Regulations 2010 by the Building Regulations etc. (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2023 and came into force on 1 October 2023. Its opening duty, regulation 11A, is the one that describes what project management is for: a client must make suitable arrangements for planning, managing and monitoring a project, including allocation of sufficient time and other resources, so as to ensure compliance with all relevant requirements.

Regulation 11A then says what makes arrangements suitable. They must ensure that the design work is carried out so that the building work to which it relates, if built, would comply with all relevant requirements; ensure the building work is carried out in accordance with all relevant requirements; enable the designers and contractors to cooperate with each other to ensure compliance; and provide for periodic review of the work to identify whether it is higher-risk building work. The client must ensure those arrangements are maintained and reviewed throughout the project, must provide building information as soon as practicable to every designer and contractor on the project, and must cooperate with anyone else working on it so far as necessary for them to fulfil their own duties.

Read as a description rather than as law, that is a job specification for a project manager: enough time and money in the programme, a design that would actually comply if built, coordination between the people doing it, information reaching everyone who needs it, and someone reviewing whether all of that is still true as the job goes on.

Regulation 11C deals with domestic clients, and it moves the burden. Where the client is a domestic client, the duties in regulations 11A(1) to (3) and 11E(2) to (5) must be carried out by the contractor where there is only one contractor for the project; by the principal contractor where there is more than one contractor; or by the principal designer where the client and the principal designer agree in writing.

That written agreement is the hinge, and it is the same structure homeowners meet under health and safety law. If you want your architect or your project manager to hold the duties rather than the builder, it has to be agreed in writing with them. Absent that agreement, the duties sit with the principal contractor, whatever anyone assumed at the first meeting.

Regulation 11C also covers what happens when nobody is appointed at all. If a domestic client fails to make the appointments required by regulation 11D, the designer in control of the design phase is the principal designer and the contractor in control of the construction phase is the principal contractor. The provision in regulation 11D(5) that would otherwise make a non-appointing client carry those duties itself does not apply to a domestic client. In other words, the roles exist whether or not you fill them - but leaving them to be filled by default means nobody has consciously accepted them.

Regulation 11F puts competence in the regulations for the first time. Any person carrying out building work or design work must have, where an individual, the skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours necessary, or where not an individual, the organisational capability, to carry out the building work in accordance with all relevant requirements, or the design work so that the building work to which it relates would be in accordance with them. A separate paragraph applies the same test to fulfilling the duties of a contractor or a designer under the Regulations.

The regulation also deals with trainees. The requirements do not apply to an individual who is in training to fulfil them, but the person who asked them to carry out the work must ensure they are adequately supervised, and a person in training to fulfil the requirements of a principal contractor or principal designer may not be appointed as one.

For a homeowner the practical use of regulation 11F is as a question rather than as a remedy. Asking a prospective principal contractor or principal designer how they satisfy themselves of their own competence for this particular type of work, and what they do about supervising anyone in training, is a fair question with a statutory basis behind it, and the quality of the answer tells you a great deal.

The commonest failure is a management role with no authority. A project manager who cannot instruct a variation, cannot hold a payment and cannot stop work is a messenger, and the household ends up making the decisions anyway - usually on the phone, in a hurry, without a record. Whatever the arrangement, it should say who can issue instructions and what happens to the price when they do.

The second is an unpriced programme. Regulation 11A's phrase about allocating sufficient time and other resources describes the single commonest cause of trouble on domestic sites: a date agreed before the consents were in hand, with the pressure landing on whoever is on site. Planning determinations, party wall notice periods, structural design and building control inspections all have their own durations, and a programme that does not contain them is not a programme.

The third is duplication. Homeowners sometimes pay an architect, a project manager and a design-and-build contractor for overlapping coordination, and end up with three people who each believe someone else is watching the detail. A single sheet naming who is principal designer, who is principal contractor, who holds the domestic client duties and who may issue instructions solves most of it before it starts.

Fees for this service track the number of interfaces rather than the value of the building work. How many separate consultants and contractors have to be coordinated, how long the programme runs and how often someone is expected on site, whether the role includes cost control and valuations or only coordination, whether consents are being obtained as part of the service, how much design responsibility comes with the appointment, and whether the project manager is also taking on the principal designer role and the client duties that can be agreed with it. A single-contractor extension needs a very different arrangement from a phased refurbishment with four trades contracted separately.

LokalMatch introduces you and stops there. Describe the project once, with your postcode, the stage it has reached and what you want managed, and project managers and consultants working in your area will respond. Homeowners pay nothing to use LokalMatch, and the pros pay for the enquiries they receive. LokalMatch does not manage or carry out any work, does not set fees and does not vet, rank or recommend anybody who replies, so references and evidence of comparable projects are yours to obtain.