On the 6th of April 2007 the government introduced The new Construction (Design and Management) Regulations which are designed to improve the general safety of construction sites and cut down on the number of accidents experienced during construction projects.
This new set of regulations will replace two predecessors – The CMD Regulations 1994 and The Construction (Health Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1996. Any outdated regulations were updated before the two sets were consolidated into a single new set of rules and guidelines.
Despite advances in construction and communication technology construction sites are still considered to be unnecessarily dangerous working environments, with around one third of all workplace fatalities occurring in construction and many thousands of injured occurring during construction projects each year.