Meeting your Principal Contractor obligations

Continuing our work to provide the necessary skills and qualifications necessary for building professionals to meet their obligations under the Building Safety Act 2022, we are launching the new CIOB Principal Contractor Competency Certification Scheme (PCCCS). 

The scheme provides a route to proving your competency as a Principal Contractor, as required by the Building Safety Regulator (BSR). The Principal Contractor role was one of a number of roles developed during the regulatory transformation introduced with the establishment of the BSR. These duty holders are required to have the necessary skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours, meeting the competencies outlined in PAS 8672:2022.

The Principal Contractor has control over the building during the construction phase. Where the Principal Contractor is an organisation, there will be a requirement for them to designate an individual under their control who has the task of managing their functions as the Principal Contractor.

Who is the Principal Contractor Competency Certification for?

Principal Contractors must plan, manage and monitor the design work during the building work; cooperate with the client, Principal Designer, and other designers and contractors to the extent necessary to ensure that the work complies with all relevant requirements of the building regulations; and ensure that they, and all those working on the project, co-operate, communicate and co-ordinate their work with the client, the Principal Designer, and other designers and contractors. They are also responsible for liaising with the Principal Designer and sharing information relevant to the building work, as well as assisting the client in providing information to others.

The CIOB PCCCS is suitable for individuals performing or appointed to the role of the Principal Contractor. These duty holders require an overarching understanding of all aspects of building safety, and are expected to demonstrate they have the appropriate competence to:

• interrogate design and construction activity
• challenge the quality of work and bad practices 
• identify major hazards and minimize the risk to safety during building use.

Safety work

The introduction of this new competency certificate builds on the other safety-focused work being undertaken by CIOB’s education and policy teams, delivering upon our public benefit remit. 

CIOB has also worked closely with the Association for Project Management (APM) and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) to develop a new competence framework for project managers, as well as collaborating with the Local Authority Building Control (LABC) to create new courses for building control administrative staff and officers, allowing them to meet their new obligations under the Act.

We have developed the Principal Contractor Competence and Legal Duties course through the CIOB Academy. The course covers the legislation, enforcement bodies, duty holders’ roles and responsibilities, who should be doing what, when and how, to what documentation, and golden thread information requires to be captured using digital and common data environment (CDE) from inception to completion, what is design and building work to building safety risks, defects, relevant works etc. Mandatory occurrence reporting and utilising ‘CROSS’ to what are major and notifiable changes etc.

This course will help individuals who are to be designated within their Principal Contractor to establish competence, understand and fulfil their legal duties and responsibilities on all buildings, not just higher-risk buildings (HRB).

This builds on the variety of qualifications we offer relating to building safety to ensure that the industry is prepared and properly skilled for the new competencies required as part of the Building Safety Act 2022.