The Occupational Health and Safety Act sets duties. The Construction Regulations 2014 turn those duties into named documents with dates on them, and they put two of the documents in the client's hands rather than the contractor's.
That is the whole answer to a contractor who says the OHS Act covers it. The Act covers it in the sense that it makes somebody responsible. The Regulations decide who, in writing, before anyone starts.
An Act of duties, regulations of documents
The Construction Regulations 2014 were published as Government Notice R84 in Government Gazette 37305 on 7 February 2014, under the Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993. They are made under the Act. They neither replace it nor compete with it. The Department published Draft Construction Regulations 2025 for comment in March 2025 (Gazette 52267). They would replace the 2014 text but were not in force when we checked in November 2026, so the 2014 Regulations still apply.
The difference is what each one leaves behind for an inspector, a court or a client to hold. An Act sets standards of conduct. Regulations produce artefacts: an appointment letter, a permit application, a notification, a health and safety file. A duty is arguable after the event. A dated letter is not.
So a contractor saying the Act covers it is usually saying something true and useless. The next question is which document, held by whom, dated when.
Which appointments does the client have to make?
The client must make two: the principal contractor and, where a permit is required, the agent. Clients often misjudge which appointments are theirs.
Regulation 5(1)(k) requires the client to appoint every principal contractor in writing. Not implied by the building contract, not assumed from whoever turns up on site. In writing, for the project or the portion of it they run.
Regulation 5(5) requires the client to appoint a competent person in writing as an agent where a construction work permit is required under regulation 3(1). That is a duty, not an option. Only regulation 5(6), covering work that needs notification instead of a permit, leaves the agent to the client's discretion.
Beneath both sits regulation 5(1)(h), which is not a document at all. Before appointing, ensure that the principal contractor has the necessary competencies and resources to carry out the work safely. It is a duty to check, and nobody can produce evidence of having done it unless they built that evidence at the time.
The regulation 8 appointments are made by others. The principal contractor appoints the construction manager and assistant construction managers, the construction manager appoints supervisors, and the contractor appoints the construction health and safety officer after consulting you. A contractor appointing its own people to those roles is the system working rather than a finding.
Three things the Regulations add that the Act does not
- A size threshold. Regulation 3 sets a size above which the client must apply to the provincial director for a construction work permit, at least 30 days before work starts. The Act has no such trigger. Government Notice 850 of 17 August 2018 is a temporary exemption under section 40 of the Act, and it raised the practical trigger. Regulation 3(1) as gazetted in 2014 sets lower triggers: more than 180 days, more than 1,800 person-days, or a contract of R13 million or CIDB grade 6 and above. Under the exemption the trigger is work exceeding 365 days and 3,600 person-days, or a tender value in CIDB grades 7 to 9. Check the Department's current notice before relying on any figure. A single-storey home built for the owner to live in is outside regulations 3 and 5, although the contractor must still notify under regulation 4(2).
- A trigger by activity. Regulation 4 puts notification on the contractor, at least seven days before work starts, for excavation, work at height where there is a risk of falling, demolition, or the use of explosives. It covers work below the permit threshold, whatever the size of the job, so long as no permit is required.
- Named individuals. The Act creates duties principally for employers. The Regulations create a chain of people with their names on letters, which is what lets accountability survive a change of site team.
Each of the three has its own detail and its own arguments, and each is written up separately in insights rather than compressed here.
A trench in Surrey, and the part no document covers
On 9 September 2026 the Old Bailey sentenced two contractors over a death on a site in Banstead, Surrey. Both had been convicted after trial of breaching section 3(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. Gheorghita Arsene, 33, was replacing a damaged pipe at the bottom of a deep trench on 24 June 2020 when a wall gave way and buried him in about two tonnes of soil.
The subcontractor, T Vaughan, was fined £650,000 with £40,000 in costs and the main contractor, Appledorn Developments, £500,000. A joint Surrey Police and Health and Safety Executive investigation found no supports in the trench and excavated soil stacked immediately next to it.
Those figures stay in sterling here. No exchange rate for either date sits anywhere in our archive, and a rate invented to make a paragraph read better is worse than a number in the wrong currency.
The transferable part is not the fine. Earlier on the same day, a self-employed contracts manager working for the subcontractor had seen another worker in the same unsupported excavation. He pleaded guilty in May 2026 to failing to take reasonable care for the health and safety of others affected by his acts or omissions at work. He received ten months suspended for eighteen, and was ordered to complete 150 hours of unpaid work.
Note what that charge is and what it is not. It is not a failure to hold a document. It is a failure to act on what he saw.
Every document the Regulations produce could have existed on that site and none of them was the failure. Somebody looked into the hole and walked on. The paperwork creates the person who is supposed to stop the work. It does not do the stopping.
Where South African clients meet the same excavation
Regulation 4 names excavation directly, so a South African job that looks small can carry a notification duty its client has never heard of. A drainage repair in a parking basement, a new sewer connection across a verge, or a lift pit are all excavation, and none of them reads like construction work to the person paying for it.
The Council for the Built Environment investigated four collapses between December 2025 and March 2026, at Redcliffe in Verulam, Doornkop in Soweto, Ormonde in Johannesburg and Magnolia in Sea Point. When the Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure released the findings on 20 August 2026, the aggregate across the four was 17 lives lost. ECSA, shortly afterwards, named recurring concerns relating to regulatory compliance, oversight, professional accountability, competence and enforcement.
Arabella checks every contractor on its panel on grading, capacity and delivery record before they see a client's job. That supports the regulation 5(1)(h) question about competence and resources from the client's side instead of leaving it presented by the contractor, although the duty itself stays with the client. What that covers is set out on the client page.
On Monday
Write down, on one page, the three things you actually relied on when you decided your current principal contractor could do this work safely. Date it and put it in the project file.
If the honest list is a company profile, a price and a recommendation, then you would struggle to show an inspector that regulation 5(1)(h) has been met. You now know it while it is still cheap to fix. Ask for the draft health and safety plan, the regulation 8 appointments and one reference from a job of the same nature, and read them yourself rather than filing them unopened.
