Free tool

Pre-construction information checklist

Answer four questions about your project and get the list of information we would normally ask about, ready to print or email to your design team.

What kind of project is it?

This tool gives general guidance from the answers you type. It is not legal advice about your project, and it cannot see your drawings or your site. Where a project is unusual the answer is a conversation rather than a checker. How we write this.

What this list is, and what it is not

It is the set of questions we would normally work through on a project like yours. It is not a statutory minimum, because there is not one: regulation 4(4) and HSE guidance ask for information that is relevant to the particular project, at an appropriate level of detail, and proportionate to the risks involved.

Which means a good pack on a small job is short. What makes it useful is not length but whether the things that are genuinely specific to this building are in it, and whether the things nobody knows yet are named rather than skipped.

Clientthe property, access, occupationDesignersdrawings, and the risks left behindSite visitthe building as it actually isRecordssurveys, services, old filesStructured forms,one project record,gaps namedRead anddecided bya personPre-construction informationfor this project
How ClearCDM assembles pre-construction information. Each party answers a different structured form aimed at what they actually hold, the site visit records the building as it is, and existing records are pulled in. Everything lands in one project record, where what is missing is named rather than papered over. A person then reads all of it against the design and writes the pre-construction information for that project.

The four headings HSE guidance requires

Whatever the project, complete pre-construction information has to cover proportionate information about the project itself, about the planning and management of the project, about the health and safety hazards of the site including how they will be addressed, and about anything relevant in an existing health and safety file. In more detail.

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

Sources

  1. CDM 2015, regulation 4 legislation.gov.uk
  2. CDM 2015, regulation 11 legislation.gov.uk
  3. Managing health and safety in construction, L153, Appendix 2 HSE guidance