The Building Regulations Principal Designer (BRPD) role: what clients need to know

In this Q&A, we talk to Veretec Director (and registered BRPD) Jeremy Williamson about our BRPD offering as well as the duties and challenges about which clients need to be aware.

What is the BRPD role?
The BRPD role is a statutory responsibility, introduced after the passing of the Building Safety Act 2022, which involves planning, managing and monitoring design work to ensure compliance with Building Regulations. The duties span the design stages with responsibility for ensuring the design, if built, is compliant with the Building Regulations. Responsibility for building a compliant design lies with the appointed Principal Contractor.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) envisaged the BRPD role sitting with the Lead Designer. There can also be overlap between the BRPD role and that of the Lead Designer when the roles are under separate appointments. The latter has a contractual responsibility to coordinate design work as well as a statutory duty to ensure compliance with Building Regulations.

The BRPD role differs markedly from the Principal Designer role, which relates to Building Regulations compliance and to health and safety matters associated with the design, construction and operation of a building during the pre-construction design stages.

What do clients need to know?
The legal duty to ensure designs comply with Building Regulations lies with the developer/building owner. This includes ensuring the design consultants they appoint are competent, projects are managed and monitored through appropriate systems, resourcing is adequate, coordination between designers and contractors is collaborative, and that all necessary information is gathered, held electronically and is accessible. Where a project involves Higher Risk Buildings (HRBs), as defined by the Building Safety Act, additional duties are imposed, including a competence declaration, a construction control plan, a change control plan, a mandatory occurrence reporting plan are provided to the Building Safety Regulator (BSR).

These duties impose an administrative and time burden on clients looking to deliver large, complex projects as well as exposing them to increased legal and financial risks. Appointing a dedicated and suitably skilled/experienced BRPD is a key method of ensuring a client’s legal responsibilities are discharged correctly and efficiently.

What are the challenges?
Large projects, particularly HRBs, have always required good collaboration to bring about a successful outcome. The difference now is we need to demonstrate to the BSR that we have planned, managed and monitored our design work and our designs are Building Regulations complaint to pass through ‘Gateway 2’. This is a time-consuming process that requires a comprehensive record of how designers have demonstrated design compliance, further complicated by the fact that, until recently, there was little guidance on how to provide a Gateway 2 application to the BSR, nor a sample template to assist clients and design teams.

With little guidance on how to prepare an application, clients and design teams have had to try and interpret the legislation themselves leading inevitably to a multiplicity of approaches and much confusion.

Therefore, clients and designers have faced a steep learning curve, and it will probably take some time for clients and design teams to fully embed the process within their wider approach to HRB project delivery. At Veretec, we found the recent guidance provided by the Construction Leadership Council to be very helpful, but we would like to see firmer guidance from the HSE itself to reduce the risk of long delays in the approval process.

We would like to see the Gateway process more aligned to the planning process, where the latter allows for early engagement with local planning authorities to help maximise the chances of a successful application. Such an approach would surely assist the BSR by reducing the risk of rejected applications and freeing up time to reduce the backlog of cases. We at Veretec believe that an intelligent, collaborative and streamlined approach would benefit everyone.

Why is Veretec suited to the BRPD role?
As highly experienced delivery architects who have worked on numerous HRBs, we have industry-leading expertise in how to provide compliant detailed construction information of the type required for Gateway 2 applications. Our vast knowledge of how to coordinate large, multidiscipline design teams on complex projects in a variety of sectors and on diverse building types also means we are suitably skilled to coordinate design information and lead projects to successful outcomes as we recently did for a recent Gateway 2 application on a complex Central London project.

Our delivery experience and strong background of collaboration with contractor teams and knowledge of technical buildability issues means we pre-empt design and construction challenges and produce robust design information that contractors can rely on.

We have a dedicated BRPD offer and a growing team of architects available and ready to guide developers and building owners through what is still a challenging process while guaranteeing a comprehensive and efficient service.

What projects are we working on that require a Gateway 2 application?
We are now undertaking the BRPD role on a number of projects and out of these we are particularly delighted with our Kingsland Road project for Morro Living, where we are both delivery Architect and Building Regulations Principal Designer, as this recently secured Gateway 2 approval in just 13 weeks which is the fastest approval to date in the industry.