Every building begins as a set of decisions made long before anyone picks up a tool. Where a walkway sits, how a roof is reached for maintenance, whether a service riser can be accessed safely once the building is occupied. At the drawing stage these choices feel purely technical, a matter of geometry and specification. Yet some of them carry a consequence that only surfaces years later, when someone is hurt and asks how it was allowed to happen.
For architects and technologists, that is an uncomfortable question, because the honest answer often points back to a decision taken at the very start of the project.
A sector where the stakes stay high
Construction is still one of the most dangerous industries to work in. The official safety figures for construction record 35 worker fatalities in 2024/25 and around 50,000 non-fatal injuries a year, with a fatal injury rate close to five times the all-industry average. Falls from height alone account for more than half of the deaths.
The human cost is matched by a financial one, with workplace injury and ill health in the sector estimated at an eye-watering £1.4bn a year. Those are sobering numbers in isolation, but for anyone who designs buildings they carry a second meaning. Behind a large share of these incidents sits an environment that was drawn, specified and approved by professionals, occasionally in ways that made a hazard easier to meet than it ever needed to be.
Responsibility starts earlier than most assume
There is a comfortable assumption that site safety belongs to the contractor. In law, it begins a good deal sooner. Under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations, a designer’s decisions are treated as a direct influence on the health and safety of everyone who builds a structure, works in it, maintains it and eventually takes it down.
The Building Safety Act sharpened this considerably, formalising a new principal designer role and raising the standard of competence now expected of whoever controls the design phase. Architects are often the natural candidates for that role, which means the legal spotlight increasingly reaches the studio as readily as the site.
When a decision becomes a claim
The connection between a design choice and an injury is seldom dramatic. More often it is quiet. When someone is eventually hurt, the investigation that follows works backwards through the project to find the moment the risk first entered it, and that trail frequently leads away from the site and towards the drawing board. What is far less obvious is how much of the responsibility actually attaches to the designer, and that is where the legal detail comes in. In law, the decisive question is almost always whether the harm was reasonably foreseeable at the point the decision was made.
This is exactly the sort of question personal injury teams weigh up every day. George Ide, which represents injured clients from across Sussex, Surrey and London, deals with exactly these kinds of claims for preventable injury. If the harm is foreseeable, the fact that it only became visible on someone else’s watch tends to offer the designer little cover.
In practice the triggers are small. A maintenance point that can only be reached by improvising, an edge protection detail trimmed to save money, or a material specified without much thought for how it would be lifted and handled. Liability is usually shared across client, designer and contractor, but a decision that introduced an avoidable risk can place a real part of it with the studio that drew it.
Designing the risk out
The encouraging part of this picture is that the earliest stage of a project is also the cheapest and most reliable place to remove a hazard. HSE guidance on a designer’s duty to eliminate foreseeable risks sets out a simple order of priority: remove the risk where you can, reduce whatever cannot be removed, and give clear information about anything that is left.
In practice that might mean positioning plant so it can be serviced from a safe platform, choosing a facade system that does not call for constant work at height, or flagging a residual hazard plainly so the next party can plan around it. Recording why a decision was made matters too, because a clear design rationale is far easier to defend later than a gap in the file. None of this turns designers into safety officers. It asks them to treat foreseeable harm as a design problem like any other, one that is far better solved with a pen than with a paramedic.
A serious injury reshapes a life, and the claim that can follow it may run for years. Both, more often than not, trace back to a single moment on a drawing that could have gone another way. Recognising that moment as the true starting point of site safety, rather than a formality to be tidied up on site, is one of the most valuable habits a design team can build.