On a ClearRegs project, the Architect or Principal Designer typically sets up and manages the compliance register. You’re invited to join, see the requirements linked to your work and attach supporting evidence as the work progresses, building a shared project record ready to refer back to when required.
Amendments to the Building Regulations created a Principal Contractor appointment under the Regulations themselves, alongside the long-standing CDM 2015 role. It is a second set of duties, owed to a different regime, and it is about building regulations compliance rather than health and safety. Most contractors now hold both roles on the same project without always separating them.
CDM 2015 makes you responsible for health and safety during the construction phase. The Building Regulations make you responsible for the work actually complying. Same site, same programme, different tests.
Inspection records, test certificates, product data, photographs of work about to be covered up. It exists, but it tends to live in phones, email threads and folders that nobody else can see.
At handover, at Gateway 3, or when a building control authority queries the work years afterwards. By then the trade has left and the person who took the photograph has moved on.
The titles are identical and the appointment often sits with the same company, but the duties come from different legislation and are enforced by different bodies. Being clear about which hat you are wearing matters when something is questioned.
Plan, manage and monitor the construction phase and coordinate health and safety matters, so that so far as is reasonably practicable the work is carried out without risks to health or safety.
Plan, manage and monitor the building work during the construction phase, and coordinate it so that the work is in compliance with all relevant requirements.
Both roles are appointed by the client. Under the Building Regulations the appointment sits with the wider dutyholder framework of client, principal designer, designer, principal contractor and contractor. Where no appointment is made, the duties do not disappear; they fall back to the client.
ClearRegs is normally held by the design side. The architect or principal designer builds the compliance register, decides what applies, and controls who has access. Your involvement starts when they add you to it.
They load the requirements that apply to the building, mapped to the relevant Approved Documents. That work is already done before you arrive.
You are added to that project with a role. Editors can update status and upload evidence; viewers can see the register without changing it. You only see the projects you have been added to.
Attach the certificate, test result or photograph against the requirement it proves, and move it to evidenced. The register updates for everyone at once.
You will need a free ClearRegs account so the project lead can add you, but you are not expected to build or licence a register of your own. If you do run compliance yourself on design-and-build work, you can of course create your own projects too.
Most of a contractor’s time in ClearRegs is spent on four things. None of them require learning the whole platform.
Every change records who made it and when. That matters in both directions: it shows the design side what has been done, and it shows that what you evidenced was evidenced at the time, by you.
Regulation 11N sets the additional duties of the Principal Contractor, with the appointment and competence requirements in regulation 11D. A shared compliance register is one practical way of discharging and evidencing them.
The construction phase has to be actively controlled for compliance, not just for programme. Working to a defined list of requirements, rather than to recollection, is what makes that control demonstrable.
Compliance usually fails at the interfaces between trades. When each requirement has a named owner and a status, the junctions become explicit instead of assumed.
Every contractor must cooperate with the client, principal designer and principal contractor. A register that all parties can see gives that cooperation something concrete to happen on.
Where the Principal Designer has set out how the design meets the requirements, that intent has to survive into construction. Holding design information and site evidence against the same item makes divergence visible early.
For higher-risk buildings (at least 18m or 7 storeys, with at least two residential units) the Building Safety Regulator controls the work through Gateways 2 and 3, and the evidence expected is considerably more formal.
Dutyholders must have the skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours for the role, and an organisation must designate a named individual to manage the function. A contemporaneous record is direct evidence of a controlled approach.
Enforcement now reaches much further back: the period for a building control authority to serve a notice under section 36 of the Building Act was extended from 12 months to 10 years for work carried out from 1 October 2023. A record made at the time is worth considerably more than one reconstructed a decade later.
Ask the architect or principal designer to add you to it. Being added to their project costs you nothing, because team members are included in their plan; creating your account takes a minute, and they can then invite you by email. If you manage compliance yourself on design-and-build work, you can start your own project instead.