The propping scheme was designed off a survey, and the survey was drawn from the 1987 record drawings. In 2004 a tenant took out a spine wall on the second floor to open up the office. Nobody recorded it. So the scheme now sitting in the site file props a building that stopped existing twenty years ago, and the first person who will find that out is the operator taking the roof off.
A temporary works coordinator is the person a contractor appoints to control everything erected on a site in order to build or take down the permanent structure: propping, needling, falsework, crash decks, facade retention, edge protection. The role comes from BS 5975, the British Standard that sets out how temporary works get planned, designed, checked, authorised and removed. On a demolition job it is the most consequential appointment the principal contractor makes, and it is routinely handed to whoever has the certificate rather than whoever has the judgement.
Is a temporary works coordinator a legal requirement?
Not by that name, no. Search CDM 2015 for the phrase and you will not find it. What you will find are duties that are very difficult to discharge without someone doing the job.
Regulation 19 covers the stability of structures. Regulation 20 covers demolition and dismantling, and its second paragraph is one sentence long: the arrangements for carrying out the demolition or dismantling must be recorded in writing before the work begins. Not during. Before.
HSE’s own guidance fills in what that implies. A competent person should survey and assess the structure before any potentially load-bearing part of it is altered, taking account of its age, its previous use, how it was built and what is standing next to it. A suitably qualified and experienced engineer should decide whether temporary support is needed. Bracing and propping should be designed by experienced temporary works designers, and installed, checked, inspected, maintained and dismantled to the designer’s specification. There is also a duty running the other way: commercial clients have to hand contractors the information they hold on the building’s structure, its stability, its structural form, the significant design assumptions, and any suggested work methods and sequences.
BS 5975 is not law. It is the recognised way of proving you did the above, which is why it turns up in tender requirements and insurer questionnaires, and in the expert reports after something falls over.
The roles around the coordinator
BS 5975 splits the work across four appointments. Firms with a mature procedure keep them separate. Firms without one tend to collapse all four onto the site manager.
| Role | Sits where | Owns |
|---|---|---|
| Designated Individual | Senior management, away from the project | The company’s temporary works procedure, and the appointment of coordinators to projects |
| Temporary Works Designer | In-house or a specialist consultancy | The design itself, the assumed loads and the design brief it answers |
| Temporary Works Coordinator | The project | The register, the design brief, getting designs checked, issuing permits to load and permits to dismantle |
| Temporary Works Supervisor | The working face | Day to day supervision of erection and use, reporting to the coordinator on larger or multi-front jobs |
Two parts of the coordinator’s remit carry real weight. The first is the design check: BS 5975 grades checks by category according to complexity and risk, running from a straightforward check by someone else in the design team through to an independent check by a separate organisation for the hardest cases. The second is the authority to stop. A coordinator who cannot halt a load being applied is a coordinator in title only, and that authority has to be written into the appointment and backed by the person who made it.
What triggers propping on a demolition job
The engineer decides. HSE sets out the conditions that should put the question in front of one, and on demolition work several of them are present on almost every job:
- The structure, or part of it, is known or suspected to be weak
- It will carry increased loads during the work, from machinery tracking across floors or from debris building up on them
- It was erected with temporary bracing that never formed part of the finished structure, so removing permanent elements could return it to an unstable state
- It has cantilevers or hanging floors where load paths could change as the work proceeds
- Its footprint is being reduced, which makes it less stable laterally for a given height
- Parts of it that are critical to stability could be damaged by falling debris
The third one deserves a second read. Buildings from the 1960s and 1970s in particular were put up with erection bracing that came out once the frame was complete and the floors were doing the work. Take the floors away in the wrong order and you are back to a frame that was never stable on its own, except now nobody has the erection drawings.
Scaffold is not a restraint system
This is the misunderstanding that causes the most argument on site, and HSE is blunt about it. A standard scaffold will not restrain a building during demolition or alteration.
Most standard scaffolds in Great Britain are tied independent scaffolds. They stand up on their own vertically, and they rely on being tied to the building for sideways support. Read that the other way round and the implication is obvious: the scaffold is leaning on the structure you are dismantling.
Several consequences follow, and they routinely surprise people.
A scaffold does not let you shrink the exclusion zone. It may force you to enlarge it, because the area debris can reach gets bigger. Where a scaffold is up around a building being taken down with a high-reach machine, it needs to be fully designed by a scaffold designer or temporary works engineer, with its duties established before any demolition starts, because the sudden sideways load a partial collapse exerts is not something a standard tied scaffold was ever designed for. And sheeting changes the problem again: it increases the wind load the scaffold collects and passes into the building, so a sheeted scaffold that relies on ties has to come down in step with the structure under a demolish-and-strike methodology, with the projection above the highest tie controlled. Leave it standing proud and you have built a sail on top of a building you have just weakened.
Facade retention is its own discipline. Whether it is fabricated steel or a scaffold-based system, it has to be designed by a competent person, erected, inspected, maintained and modified to that person’s instructions, and it will usually need an independent third-party check of the design. A programme that treats facade retention as a scaffold line item has underestimated it.
The register, and why it drifts
The temporary works register is the coordinator’s working document: every item of temporary works on the job, who designed it, what check category it went through, whether the check is closed, whether a permit to load has been issued, and when it can come out. It is also, on most sites, a spreadsheet on one laptop.
Drift starts the first time a design gets revised. Revision C is issued because the propping had to move around a drainage run, the coordinator is on another site that week, and the copy in the cabin stays at Revision B. Meanwhile the method statement still describes the sequence from Revision A, because nobody thought of it as a temporary works document. Now three papers describe three different jobs and the operator is working from the one taped to the wall.
This is a version control problem wearing a safety hat, and it is the kind of thing software is good at: holding one register that the design issue, the check certificate, the permit and the method statement all hang off, and flagging when an item’s design revision moves ahead of the document that describes how it gets used. That is a matter of plumbing, not intelligence. What it will not do is tell you whether the propping is adequate. Decide that with an engineer standing in the building. The same distinction applies to the wider question of health and safety software versus better documents, which is worth thinking through before anyone buys anything.
Common questions
Can the site manager be the temporary works coordinator?
On a small job with simple temporary works, yes, provided they are competent for the scope in front of them and have the time. The failure mode is a site manager holding the role on paper while running a demolition, which means the register gets updated on Friday evenings and the permits get signed retrospectively.
What is a permit to load?
The coordinator’s written confirmation that a piece of temporary works has been erected to the design, checked, and can now take load. Its counterpart is a permit to dismantle, which matters more than people think, because the removal sequence carries the same risk as the installation sequence.
Does a demolition contractor need its own coordinator if the principal contractor has one?
It depends on the interfaces. Where the demolition contractor is designing and erecting its own propping, someone on its side has to own that, and the two coordinators need a clear split of who is responsible for what. Vagueness at that boundary is where the gaps open up.
Is BS 5975 mandatory?
No. It is a standard, and standards are not regulations. Ignoring it is lawful. Defending a decision that departed from it after an incident is a different proposition.
How does this connect to the notices we serve?
Directly. The works of demolition you describe in a Section 80 notice should be the same sequence your temporary works design assumes, and a local authority serving a counter-notice can require shoring to an adjacent building, which is temporary works someone now has to design. The duties in CDM 2015 sit underneath all of it.
What should the client be giving us?
Everything they hold on the structure, plus a refurbishment and demolition asbestos survey carried out by a competent surveyor. If they cannot produce structural information, that absence is itself a finding, and it needs pricing and programming.
Where this leaves you
The coordinator role tends to fail quietly. There is no incident on the day the register stops being updated, or the day a check category gets waved through because the design came back late. The gap shows up months later, in a building that behaves differently from the drawing.
We work with demolition contractors on the information side of this: keeping surveys, designs, permits and method statements tied to one another so that a revision in one place surfaces everywhere it matters. More on our operational efficiency page for demolition contractors, or book a discovery call.
General information only. Temporary works decisions on any particular structure are for a suitably qualified engineer who has seen it.