Which role is which

What happened to the CDM coordinator role?

Short answer

The CDM coordinator was created by CDM 2007 and removed when CDM 2015 came into force on 6 April 2015. Its replacement is the principal designer, which is a materially different role: the coordinator advised the client from alongside the project, while the principal designer must be a designer with control over the pre-construction phase, sitting inside the design process rather than beside it. The title still appears on websites and in old documents, but the appointment no longer exists.

What changed, and why it matters

	CDM coordinator, CDM 2007	Principal designer, CDM 2015
Who could hold it	Anyone competent, commonly a standalone consultant	A designer with control over the pre-construction phase
Position on the project	Advising the client, alongside the design team	Inside the design process, coordinating it
Domestic projects	Largely outside the regime	Inside it, with regulation 7 reallocating client duties
Notification threshold	Different, and a common trigger	Regulation 6, and uncoupled from the appointment question

The most consequential change for small projects was not the title. It was that CDM 2015 brought domestic work properly into scope.

Why you still see the old title

Three reasons. Consultancy pages written before 2015 and never updated. Firms who keep the phrase because clients still search for it. And documents on older buildings, where a health and safety file may genuinely have been prepared by a CDM coordinator under the earlier regulations.

An existing health and safety file from a CDM 2007 project is still useful information, and under regulation 4 it is exactly the sort of thing a client should be handing over as pre-construction information at the start of the next project.

Written by James Nicholson, BSc (Hons) Architectural TechnologyLast reviewed 28 August 2026How we write this