A community of designers who wish to demonstrate their knowledge or competence at industry prescribed and accredited levels.

Construction and building designers can do more to improve safety during construction, and also through the whole life of a structure. The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 1994 (CDM) are under review and designers are likely to become a more focussed target for enforcement and also civil claims.

SiD is developing benchmarks for designers in relation to knowledge and competence. This helps by:

• Allowing designers to prove their competence against an all industry standard
• Explaining to those parts of the design community who are not competent where their weaknesses are.
• Giving those who are appointing designers some confidence that they have discharged their statutory duty to make appointments only of competent individuals and teams
• Setting standards for training providers

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PROGRESS

At 18^th Dec 2003 SiD and CIC have agreed the programme for developing the accreditation scheme. This is to be project managed by CIC and delivered by SiD with guidance from across industry. Four milestones are built in to progress, including consultation.

Updates on progress will be posted regularly.

The Learning Aims and Standards of Competence documents were launched at RIBA on 19th April 2005.

Statement from SiD, CiC and HSE

 SiD Competence Standards Accreditation Edition Mar 05
 SiD Learning Aims Accreditation Edition Mar 05

TRAINING PROVIDERS 

If you provide or plan to provide courses to help designers to comply with statutory duties under health and safety law as part of the design courses you deliver, we are keen to help you to work in partnership with SiD to ensure that you are providing trainees with the latest thinking in creative design. Contact Us if you would like to be kept informed of schemes to support your training courses.

We are currently developing ways to partner with industry to ensure that the training quality is professional, flexible, industry focussed and effective.  More information will be posted here shortly about the details of ways in which you can use the SiD logo on your designer training or become a SiD approved trainer or training providor both for internal and external courses.

INDUSTRY INVOLVEMENT

A great many people and organisations have contributed to the first set of design guides. Some areas of the country and some industries are actively working to see how the guides can help them, perhaps by running workshops and feedback workshops for designers. We are keen to assist in this process by a variety of means and you can contact SiD directly or ask for us via CIC or the stakeholder organisations' health and safety committees or champions.

Heavy industry has a need for similar standards and guidance. We are working to support the power and water supply industries and also linking with road and rail for information purposes at the very least.