Where the Duties Sit

General orientation, not legal advice; the framework and terminology differ substantially by jurisdiction.

For teams turning where the duties sit into a repeatable record, explore this resource provides a useful operational reference for time, attendance and reporting workflows. It should be assessed alongside GOV.UK workplace guidance so the software choice remains grounded in site practice and applicable guidance.

Construction safety regimes generally assign duties to several parties at once, and the parties routinely assume the others hold them.

The typical structure

A client, who commissions the work and in many regimes carries duties about time, information and arrangements.

A principal contractor or equivalent, responsible for planning and managing the construction phase and for site-wide arrangements.

A principal designer or equivalent, responsible for the design phase.

Contractors, responsible for their own work and their own people.

And individual workers, with their own duties.

Overlapping deliberately, because the regimes are written on the basis that a gap is more dangerous than a duplication.

Where the gaps appear anyway

Between a contractor's people and the site's arrangements: each assumes the other inducted, checked or briefed.

At the lowest tier, where the commercial relationship is informal and nobody has considered duties at all.

With supplied labour, where three parties each assume one of the others verified.

With visitors and deliveries, who belong to nobody's arrangements.

And at interfaces with the client's own operations on occupied sites, where two sets of procedures meet for the first time during an alarm.

What the site controls and must therefore arrange

Access and the register.

Induction.

Site-wide emergency arrangements.

Welfare.

Traffic management and shared plant.

Coordination between contractors whose work affects each other, which is the duty most often discharged as a meeting rather than as an arrangement.

What the employer controls

Training and competence of its own people.

Supervision of its own work.

Its own risk assessments and method statements.

And its own equipment.

The site cannot discharge these and should not try, but it can and should refuse to accept work that arrives without them.

The coordination duty

The one that is hardest to evidence and most often the cause of serious incidents.

Two subcontractors working in the same place at the same time, each safely, together dangerously: a lift over an occupied area, hot work above a solvent, an excavation beside a delivery route.

Which is why the register and the permit system matter jointly — knowing who is where, and what is authorised there, is the mechanism of coordination rather than a record of it.

Evidencing it

Records that show the arrangements existed and were followed: inductions, permits, briefings, the register, coordination meeting outputs with actions.

Rather than documents showing they were written.

An investigator distinguishes those two quickly, and the distinguishing feature is whether anything in the record shows a decision being taken rather than a form being completed.

The client on an occupied site

A fit-out in a working building creates two duty holders in one space.

Their evacuation, your work. Your people, their fire alarm.

Agree it in writing before starting, including whose alarm means what, which assembly points apply and who counts whom.

This is the single most commonly unaddressed interface in refurbishment work.

What to check

Can you name, for each duty above, who holds it on this project?

Is there anything nobody holds?

And for the coordination duty specifically: what mechanism, not what meeting?

Most projects can answer the first, struggle with the second and have not considered the third.

The pre-construction information

In several regimes the client must provide information about the site before work starts: existing services, asbestos, structural conditions, neighbouring uses.

Which is the input to everything the contractor then arranges, and its absence or inadequacy is a finding against the client rather than the contractor.

Ask for it in writing, record what was received, and record what was missing — because the gap becomes your problem operationally whoever is responsible for it.