Here is a summary of the ACA response to the MHCLG Call for Evidence

The Association of Consultant Architects (ACA) response to the MHCLG Call for Evidence: Strategy for the Built Environment Professions, Trades and Occupations argues that the central weakness of the UK construction system is not primarily a lack of professional guidance or competence frameworks, but the absence of enforceable regulation of the people actually performing critical functions.

The ACA’s submission is built around two central propositions:

1. Make Principal Designer a regulated, reserved function

The ACA argues that regulation of the title “architect” is insufficient because someone removed from the Architects Register can continue doing the same work, provided they do not call themselves an architect.

Instead, regulation should attach to functions, with certain activities legally reserved to registered and competent professionals.

The ACA proposes that the Building Regulations Principal Designer function should be reserved to:

  • registered architects;
  • appropriately regulated engineers;
  • Chartered Architectural Technologists; and
  • RICS surveyors,

provided the individual is actually leading the design, has appropriate competence, CPD and professional indemnity insurance, and belongs to a profession regulated to an equivalent standard.

The ACA does not want a new profession of Principal Designers. It believes the function should sit with existing design professions.

2. Appoint the Principal Designer at the beginning — and name them on the planning application

The ACA regards this as its single most practical reform.

Currently, the Building Regulations dutyholder regime effectively becomes operative too late, around the building-regulations application stage. By then, fundamental design, procurement and cost decisions have already been made.

The ACA proposes:

  1. A Principal Designer must be appointed before any design work begins.
  2. Their name must appear on every planning application, including outline applications and permission in principle.
  3. The lead designer should normally become the Principal Designer by default.

The planning application is identified as the critical enforcement point because it is the first stage at which the public system formally knows that a project exists. It would also prevent contractors or unrelated consultants from taking on the Principal Designer role later simply as a contractual or administrative exercise.

The ACA’s diagnosis of the problem

The submission repeatedly identifies a common underlying pattern:

The industry has plenty of standards and guidance, but too little enforcement, accountability and incentive to follow them.

The ACA argues that:

  • client competence cannot realistically be solved through education, particularly for one-off domestic clients and small developers;
  • voluntary competence schemes have attracted very little participation;
  • there are only around 100 registered Principal Designers across all existing registers, despite the regime applying to building work throughout England;
  • price-led procurement systematically rewards those who exclude proper design coordination, checking and inspection from their fees;
  • design-and-build procurement frequently transfers risk without transferring the necessary design capability;
  • architects carry disproportionate liability because they are one of the few construction professions with meaningful professional indemnity insurance;
  • contractors and third-party consultants are increasingly taking on Principal Designer roles despite not actually controlling the design;
  • the distinction between the Building Regulations Principal Designer and CDM Principal Designer is poorly understood;
  • small domestic builders can undertake design work without registration, insurance or effective accountability.

Pre-design

The ACA sees the pre-design stage as the cheapest and most important point for intervention.

Key decisions made here determine almost everything that follows:

  • procurement route;
  • contract form;
  • design-team appointments;
  • programme;
  • fees;
  • risk allocation;
  • competence of the team;
  • adequacy of site and existing-building information.

The ACA strongly rejects the idea that clients simply need more education. Its argument is essentially:

The client does not need to become competent; the client needs to appoint someone who is.

It therefore wants the competent Principal Designer involved before decisions become fixed.

It also strongly criticises lowest-price procurement, arguing that the cheapest bid frequently succeeds by silently excluding the coordination, checking and record-keeping required for a safe and properly documented building.

Design and specification

The ACA sees the principal problem as particularly stark:

Anyone can currently design a building.

There is no general requirement for someone designing a building to be:

  • qualified;
  • registered;
  • insured; or
  • accountable.

This is particularly problematic in smaller residential projects, conversions, extensions and changes of use.

The ACA positions architects as the profession best equipped to undertake the general coordination role because of their traditional role as design generalists who understand how different technical disciplines interact.

It nevertheless acknowledges weaknesses within architecture itself, particularly:

  • declining technical breadth;
  • reduced site experience;
  • inadequate exposure to contract administration;
  • the need for further competence in retrofit and existing buildings.

The ACA therefore accepts that architects must be prepared to meet the higher competence requirements that would accompany an expanded Principal Designer role.

Strong criticism of current Principal Designer practice

One of the strongest parts of the submission concerns what the ACA regards as the misuse of the Principal Designer role.

It identifies five problems:

  1. Contractors acting as Principal Designer on design-and-build projects, even where the contractor is not actually controlling the design.
  2. Third-party consultants selling the role as a bolt-on service, despite having no meaningful control over design.
  3. Confusion between the two Principal Designer regimes under Building Regulations and CDM.
  4. Fragmentation of design responsibility between planning, technical and executive architects.
  5. Contractor-controlled specialist design, particularly for cladding, fire stopping, connections and ventilation.

The ACA’s view is that the Principal Designer must be the person who actually controls and coordinates the design, not simply whoever has been given the contractual label.

Construction

The ACA’s construction-stage concerns centre on fragmentation, cost cutting and the disappearance of independent design oversight.

It gives examples of:

  • trades interfering with one another’s work;
  • subcontractors changing specified solutions;
  • inadequate site supervision;
  • design information failing to reach lower tiers of the supply chain;
  • contractors changing materials and methods to reduce cost;
  • architects being novated to contractors and effectively excluded from site inspection.

The ACA advocates restoring a meaningful role for the design team during construction, including funded inspection and certification.

For larger and more complex projects it suggests that clients should perhaps be required to employ an independent clerk of works.

It also wants:

  • design review of substitutions affecting fire, structure or building performance;
  • reform of retention practices;
  • stronger construction-sector registration; and
  • above all, mandatory professional indemnity insurance for anyone offering design services.

Domestic construction: insurance as the key protection

The ACA considers the domestic market the weakest point in the system.

Its preferred mechanism is a combination of:

registration + mandatory insurance.

A builder offering design services would have to demonstrate professional indemnity insurance covering negligent design.

The ACA argues that this has an important advantage: the insurance market itself becomes a continuous competence filter. Insurers would have an incentive to establish whether a contractor has appropriate skills and procedures.

It also supports registration schemes modelled on existing Gas Safe and electrical competent-person schemes, where registration has real consequences.

Crucially, removal from a register should mean that the individual cannot continue performing the reserved activity.

Occupation and maintenance

The ACA identifies the handover from construction to occupation as another major weakness.

Problems include:

  • incomplete Health & Safety Files and O&M information;
  • inadequate information about existing buildings;
  • insufficient retrofit expertise;
  • declining traditional-building and heritage skills;
  • fragmented responsibility for whole-building performance;
  • little post-occupancy evaluation;
  • reactive rather than planned maintenance.

It recommends making complete handover information a condition of completion, and requiring post-occupancy evaluation for publicly funded projects.

Single Construction Regulator

The ACA strongly supports a Single Construction Regulator, but argues that government should build it around ARB rather than start from scratch.

Its reasoning is pragmatic: ARB is currently the only statutory regulator of a construction profession.

However, the new regulator must be fundamentally different in scope. It should regulate functions as well as titles and cover the wider construction ecosystem:

  • architects;
  • engineers;
  • surveyors;
  • architectural technologists;
  • contractors;
  • trades;
  • consultants and other relevant practitioners.

The ACA proposes a single register with real powers, including the ability to prevent excluded individuals from continuing to practise reserved functions.

It also wants the regulator to have a cross-sector view, allowing it to identify recurring defects, disputes, enforcement failures and consumer problems that sit between professional disciplines.

Procurement and contracts

A significant strand of the response is the ACA’s criticism of price-led procurement.

It argues that government itself contributes to the problem by routinely selecting design services heavily on price.

The ACA recommends:

  • capping the weighting given to price in public procurement of design services;
  • actively promoting collaborative procurement;
  • requiring public-sector clients to consider collaborative contracts;
  • collecting and publishing outcome data on procurement routes.

The ACA draws heavily on its own experience developing PPC2000, TPC2005, FAC-1 and TAC-1, arguing that collaborative contracting can improve information flow, accountability and team integration.

Its broader point is that many of the solutions recommended by previous government reviews already exist — the problem has been failure to implement them.

What the ACA says government should do

The submission ultimately boils down to a relatively short programme of reforms:

  1. Make Principal Designer a reserved statutory function.
  2. Limit it to properly regulated, competent and insured professionals who actually lead the design.
  3. Appoint the Principal Designer before design begins.
  4. Name the Principal Designer on every planning application.
  5. Make the lead designer the Principal Designer by default.
  6. Require PI insurance for anyone offering design services, including domestic builders.
  7. Introduce meaningful registration of contractors and trades, particularly in the domestic sector.
  8. Build the Single Construction Regulator on the existing ARB framework.
  9. Give regulation real consequences: removal from a register must prevent practice of the regulated function.
  10. Reduce the dominance of lowest-price procurement.
  11. Retain competent design professionals through construction with properly funded inspection roles.
  12. Require review of safety-critical design substitutions.
  13. Improve building handover information and post-occupancy evaluation.
  14. Rationalise the various competence schemes through mutual recognition.

The ACA’s central message

The whole response can be reduced to one proposition:

The UK does not principally need more guidance, education or voluntary competence schemes. It needs to ensure that a competent, insured and accountable professional is actually responsible for building design from the beginning of a project — and that people who are not competent cannot legally perform that function.

The ACA sees the Principal Designer, planning application and Single Construction Regulator as three parts of the same solution:

appoint early → identify publicly → regulate the function → insure it → enforce it.

It also makes an important broader argument: regulating architects more heavily while leaving their competitors unregulated has distorted the market rather than improved building safety. Regulation therefore needs to extend across the construction sector, rather than simply adding further obligations to architects.

Finally, the ACA warns that the forthcoming strategy should not be developed in isolation. The Single Construction Regulator, building-control reform, construction-products reform and the professions strategy need to be sequenced as one system, with realistic transition periods for an industry already coping with a substantial volume of regulatory change.