Posted By John Caboche In my experience the utilities contractors are regarded as "contractors" under CDM, working under the principle contractor. The PC usually undertakes services connection as part of the contract works and sub contracts this to the utilities. Under CDM the PC must ensure that the contractors work is co-ordinated and complies with the safety rules in the construction phase H + S plan, that all contractors co-operate, and inform the PC of any hazards arising from their work amongst other things. In summary the PC has a functional responsibility to manage contractors. This would include the utilities by default as I cannot think of a single instance where the utilities worked directly for the client, but I'm happy to stand corrected if anyone else has experience of this. They will almost certainly be required to submit risk assessments and method statements to the PC to allow the PC to fulfill their management and co-ordination role. Hope this helps

Posted By John Caboche Martyn, apologies for muddying the waters, I would still treat the utilities as contractors rather than as a separate PC for the purposes of the exercise, I've been involved in civil engineering both on the project management side and the H and S side for a while now, and I have always controlled the utilities as contractors, from and administration and management perspective it is much easier, part of the problem with what I percieve to be your situation (correct me if I'm wrong) is control of streetworks and responsibility for highways works. Many utilities require no permission to excavate in the hightway whereas the poor old civil engineering contractor has to jump through hoops to even lift a kerbstone. If the client wants to treat the utilities as PC until they get to the site boundry, my view is that, they will be his problem and not yours, legally speaking once inside the site boundry they are your contractor as you have legal possession of the site during construction works. Again CDM would depend on duration/man hours envisaged on whether the work would be notifiable, but would probably come under CDM regs as many would employ more than 5 persons for this type of work so the utility would have to provide a full construction phase plan, many in my experience don't like this and prefer to work as contractors under just a method statement. Don't know if I've made that any clearer or made it worse.....