Governing the expanding design team: Whose design is it anyway?
Closing the Responsibility Gap
By John Taylor, Publications Manager at BSRIA
Who’s responsible for the design? It sounds like an easy question. And, in theory, it should have an easy answer. The Building Regulations’ duty holder regime assigns responsibility for compliant design, but behind this is a wide range of design specialisms that must all be carefully coordinated and later evidenced to the regulator. Here, John Taylor, BSRIA Publications Manager, looks at what happens when those lines become blurred, and how to make sure that everyone knows the part they play.
Working out exactly who’s responsible for what has never been more complicated. Design teams have expanded significantly, bringing together an increasing number of consultants, specialists, contractors, manufacturers and suppliers. Meanwhile, specialist design continues well into construction, meaning responsibility is spread across organisations, disciplines and project stages.
None of this is particularly new. What’s changed is the sheer number of organisations and disciplines involved and, also, the number of opportunities for something to get missed.
The RIBA Plan of Work 2020 reflects this changing landscape. It notes that the relationship between design and construction teams has become more complex, with aspects of building design increasingly carried out by specialist subcontractors. Alongside the core design team, it identifies and classifies a wide range of specialist input; from fire and acoustic consultants to façade, sustainability and BIM specialists.
That additional expertise is welcome and has become essential for the construction of safer, better buildings. But every additional interface raises questions about who produces the information, who relies on it, who reviews it, and where one organisation’s responsibility ends and another’s begins.
The problem isn’t having more people around the table. It’s making sure everyone knows what they’re bringing to it.
The more... (but maybe not) the merrier?
A large design team is not inherently a problem. Unclear responsibility is.
As more specialists contribute to a project, the number of dependencies between them grows too. One discipline is waiting for information from another. One calculation relies on an assumption made elsewhere. One review is sitting untouched because everybody thinks somebody else has it covered. It doesn’t take much before gaps begin to appear.
The consequences of those gaps often emerge later, through errors, delays and rework. The Get It Right Initiative (GIRI) measured direct costs of avoidable errors at around 5% of project value, equating to approximately £5bn a year in the UK and considerably more once knock-on delays are included. GIRI's research also identifies poorly communicated and badly coordinated design information as a principal cause of error, alongside inadequate planning and late design changes.
The biggest risk may not sit with any one discipline: instead, it’s what happens in the gaps between them. A team can have all the right expertise and still encounter problems if nobody has clearly defined how one person's work connects to the next person's.
More processes, same old problem
When coordination becomes difficult, the industry’s instinct is often to add more: more drawings, more trackers, more meetings and more procedures. Perhaps another spreadsheet for good measure. But volume alone doesn’t create clarity. If nobody knows who owns an activity, another spreadsheet won’t solve the problem.
What matters is structure: clear definitions, clear lines of responsibility and an agreed understanding of who leads, supports and reviews each activity, and when. When that’s established from the outset and kept visible, gaps can be identified in a planning meeting rather than being discovered on site. The consequences aren’t difficult to imagine. Unclear ownership can mean:
Duplicated or omitted design work
Late information and approval bottlenecks
Coordination errors and rework
Disputes over scope and liability
Incomplete compliance evidence
Delayed completion or occupation
Clarity on responsibility leads to effective and timely delivery. There's simply no more room in our industry for guess work.
No room for assumption
This has become a sharper issue following the Building Safety Act 2022 and subsequent changes to the Building Regulations. The duty holder regime identifies clients, principal designers, designers, principal contractors and contractors, with requirements around competence as well as planning, managing, monitoring, cooperation and coordination.
In that context, “I assumed someone else was covering that” is no longer really acceptable. And it’s certainly a far riskier position than it once was.
Unclear responsibilities and gaps in design information can ultimately create problems when demonstrating compliance, in particular with compliance Gateways for higher-risk buildings. Without a completion certificate, a new higher-risk building can’t be occupied. Clear ownership is no longer simply good project management; it has serious consequences for whether a project can progress and be occupied.
Making responsibility visible
BSRIA's BG6, a Design Framework for Building Services, is designed to provide that clarity.
It provides a framework for defining and allocating design activities and information production across project stages, tailored to the individual project team. This gives expanding teams an agreed structure for establishing who leads, supports and reviews each activity, making responsibilities and dependencies visible, rather than assumed.
Speaking of assumptions, here's a few questions to ask before agreeing your next contract:
Can every design activity be traced to a named owner?
Does everyone know the dependencies on each other’s work?
Which specialist designers are needed at the current stage?
Which activities are we each quietly assuming someone else is covering?
Under the Building Regulations duty holder tasks, can we show who is accountable and competent for each part of the design?
Is everyone aligned on the stage deliverables and the level of detail?
If every question gets an immediate answer, great. If a few are met with silence, that's probably worth investigating.
Because complexity is not going away. If anything, it will intensify. Design teams will continue to expand and specialist input will continue to grow. If we want better coordinated designs, fewer errors and more accountable project delivery, we need to move away from assumptions about who is doing what; instead, we need to know.
Ultimately, everyone needs to know their lines, and exactly when it’s their turn to deliver them.
BG6 is designed to make sure they do.