Any advice would be greatly received on this!

I have 'fallen' into a project supervisor role with my current employer and me and my boss are disagreeing on the requirements under CDM. We are a LTD company that manage the day to day maintenance of a hosuing charity housing vulnerable adults. The charity has become the landlord of a property with 25 bedrooms. Our limited company are contracted to do all the works for the charity, thus allowing us to make some money whilst doing the works.

The charity have £180000 budget to refurbish the two run down properties. They will both remain occupied throughout the works. Works range from external rainwater goods replacement to internal bathroom replacement, kitchen replacement and general decorating and floor covering replacement. It also includes replacing all the windows and a flat roof.

I am arguing that this is a much bigger project than we have ever managed before and needs a bit more than a makeshift costings and 'we will work it out as we go'. To a certain extent he agrees but all the works baring a few odd jobs, will be sub-contracted

My question is a 25 bed residential HMO, that has a full time care agency present within the building (so is also several peoples place of work) needs a full plan in place to implement a refurbishment of this size. I also believe it will fall under CDM and the LTD company will be the principle contractor. We have arranged all the spec, schedule of work and managed the tender process so far. I guess the charity would be the client in this case. But the boss disagrees with that and believes we can just do a rolling refurbishment as and when.

I think we need to get our stuff together before we get our fingers burnt. Any advice or directing to some legislation would be appreciated. He seems to think it is solely the responsibility of any sub contractors on site to manage their own health and safety provisions and we hold no liability. If I am barking up the wrong tree and he is right on this then great, but I think otherwise

Lewis, I think that you and your boss need to read all the stuff on CDM published by or with HSE, perhaps starting with the guides for each duty holder published by CITB/ConstructionSkills (which you will find links to at the HSE website), then wade through L153 "Managing health and safety in construction".

Depending on the age of the building, you may well need to also worry about asbestos risk management and the need for a Refurbishment Asbestos Survey to the standard set out in HSG264.

As Bigmac says the project might also be CDM notifiable and with a budget of £180k it probably is. Whether or not, you have already indicated that there were be multiple subbies, so the charity as Client needs to appoint someone as Principal Designer and someone presumably your company as Principal Contractor. Likely that your company may end up as both PD and PC, so lots of opportunity to get fingers burnt.