CDM 2024: Construction Safety Must Begin Before the First Worker Arrives

By Zuflin Nazli Mohd Ghazali

The Accident Happens on Site. The Failure May Have Started Elsewhere.

A worker falls from an elevated platform. A temporary structure collapses. An excavation gives way, trapping those working below.

Investigators arrive. The familiar questions begin. Was the worker trained? Was the supervisor present? Were the necessary permits issued? Were safety procedures followed?

All legitimate questions. But sometimes, they are asked far too late in the chain of decisions that created the danger.

Who approved the construction schedule? Who decided the budget? Who accepted a design that made safe access difficult? Who appointed a contractor without adequately assessing its capability?

These decisions may have been made months before construction began, often in comfortable meeting rooms far removed from the risks eventually faced by workers.

Yet when something goes wrong, attention frequently settles on those closest to the incident.

Malaysia’s Occupational Safety and Health (Construction Work) (Design and Management) Regulations 2024, commonly known as CDM 2024, challenge this approach.

The regulations establish duties that extend beyond contractors and site personnel to clients, designers and those responsible for coordinating construction activities.

The principle is clear: those who influence construction risks must take responsibility for managing them.

A Regulatory Shift That Malaysia Cannot Afford to Misunderstand

CDM 2024 came into operation on 1 June 2024 under the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994, coinciding with significant amendments to Malaysia’s occupational safety and health legislative framework.

Its importance lies in moving the focus of construction safety further upstream, into project planning, design, procurement and coordination.

For decades, much of the industry’s safety effort has concentrated on site inspections, personal protective equipment, permit-to-work systems and worker behaviour.

These controls remain essential. However, they cannot independently correct every risk introduced by poor planning, inadequate resources or unsuitable design.

CDM 2024 identifies responsibilities across several duty holders, including clients, construction work designers, principal construction work designers, construction work contractors and principal construction work contractors.

Each has a different role, but their responsibilities are interconnected.

The client influences resources and project arrangements. Designers influence how structures can be constructed, used and maintained. Contractors determine how construction work is executed.

The regulations recognise that safety is not an activity that begins when workers report to the construction site.

It is a consideration that must influence the decisions made before work begins and throughout the project lifecycle.

The Client Is Not Merely Paying for the Project

One of the most consequential provisions is Regulation 4, which requires clients to make suitable arrangements for managing construction projects, including allocating sufficient time, funds and other resources.

Those arrangements must be maintained and reviewed throughout the project. The regulation also addresses the provision of appropriate welfare facilities.

This places significant responsibility on project owners, developers, corporate management and those commissioning construction work.

Consider a project with an unrealistic completion deadline.

To meet that deadline, multiple activities are compressed into limited working areas. Contractors compete for access. Lifting operations overlap with other work. Supervision becomes stretched.

The safety team may respond with additional inspections and toolbox briefings. But these measures cannot fully compensate for fundamentally poor project arrangements.

The problem did not necessarily begin with the worker. It may have originated in the project strategy.

Regulation 7 also requires written appointments of a principal construction work designer and principal construction work contractor where more than one contractor is involved, or such involvement is reasonably foreseeable.

For non-domestic clients, failure to make the required appointments can result in the client assuming the corresponding statutory duties. Different arrangements apply to domestic clients under Regulation 9.

A client therefore cannot assume that appointing contractors automatically transfers every safety responsibility away from the organisation commissioning the work.

Contracting out construction work does not mean contracting away accountability.

A Safe Structure Must Also Be Safe to Build

Regulation 11 establishes important duties for construction work designers concerning foreseeable risks arising from their designs.

Designers must address risks affecting those undertaking construction work, maintaining or cleaning structures, and using structures designed as workplaces.

The regulation requires the elimination of foreseeable risks where practicable, with appropriate measures to reduce or control risks that cannot be eliminated.

Consider a building requiring regular maintenance at height.

If permanent access platforms and suitable anchor points are incorporated during design, future exposure to fall hazards may be significantly reduced.

Without these provisions, maintenance personnel may repeatedly depend on temporary access equipment and additional administrative controls.

Similar considerations apply to structural stability, lifting arrangements, equipment accessibility, temporary works and construction sequencing.

The objective is not to eliminate every possible hazard through design. That would be unrealistic.

It is to ensure that foreseeable risks are addressed when designers still have meaningful opportunities to influence them.

Regulation 10 further reinforces the importance of appropriate skills, knowledge, experience and organisational capability among designers and contractors.

Competence cannot be established merely through an impressive company profile or a competitive commercial proposal.

A design that is technically sound but unnecessarily dangerous to construct should never be considered a complete engineering success.

Coordination Must Be More Than a Letter of Appointment

Construction projects rarely involve a single organisation working independently.

Design consultants, civil contractors, mechanical contractors, electrical specialists, lifting teams and subcontractors may operate within the same project, sometimes simultaneously.

Their activities can introduce risks that no individual contractor can manage effectively in isolation.

CDM 2024 addresses this challenge through the responsibilities of principal duty holders.

The principal construction work designer coordinates relevant safety and health matters during the pre-construction phase, while the principal construction work contractor performs corresponding management and coordination functions during construction.

These appointments must result in effective action.

A formal letter does not guarantee that design risks are communicated, construction interfaces are managed or conflicting activities are properly coordinated.

Regulation 8 also requires notification to the Director General when construction work is scheduled to last longer than 30 working days or exceed 500 person-days, subject to the regulation’s applicable requirements.

These are alternative thresholds, not conditions that must both be satisfied.

Importantly, notification requirements and principal duty-holder appointments serve different purposes. The absence of a notification requirement does not automatically remove other applicable CDM duties.

For industry practitioners, this distinction matters.

Legal compliance begins with understanding precisely which obligations apply, rather than assuming that one administrative threshold determines the entire regulatory framework.

Documentation Is Necessary. Paper Compliance Is Not Enough.

CDM 2024 establishes requirements involving pre-construction information, construction phase planning and safety and health information for future work.

Each serves a distinct purpose.

Pre-construction information enables relevant project risks and circumstances to be communicated to those involved in design and construction.

The construction phase plan establishes arrangements for managing safety and health during construction and must be prepared before the construction phase begins.

The safety and health file preserves relevant information needed for subsequent work involving the completed structure.

Responsibility for preparing, developing and maintaining these documents must be understood in accordance with the applicable duty-holder provisions.

However, documentation becomes ineffective when it exists primarily to satisfy an audit or regulatory inspection.

A construction phase plan copied from another project may look comprehensive while overlooking actual site conditions.

A design risk assessment that identifies generic hazards without influencing engineering decisions offers limited preventive value.

And a safety and health file containing hundreds of irrelevant pages may provide little practical assistance to future maintenance personnel.

The quality of construction safety management should not be judged by the volume of documents produced.

It should be judged by whether those documents inform decisions, communicate significant risks and support effective controls.

A completed checklist is not evidence that a hazard has been controlled.

Construction Safety Is a Boardroom Responsibility

The introduction of CDM 2024 should also change how senior management evaluates construction safety performance.

Many organisations continue to rely heavily on injury statistics, audit scores, training completion rates and inspection findings.

These indicators have value, but they cannot provide a complete picture of construction risk.

A project may record zero injuries while carrying unresolved design hazards, inadequate temporary works arrangements or poorly coordinated contractor interfaces.

The absence of accidents does not automatically demonstrate the presence of effective risk management.

Senior management must therefore examine the decisions that shape project conditions.

Were sufficient resources allocated? Were realistic timelines established? Were competent duty holders appointed? Were design risks challenged? Were contractors evaluated for their actual capabilities?

And when essential safety arrangements are inadequate, is the organisation prepared to change the project plan rather than simply demand better performance from the site team?

These questions belong at the highest levels of project governance.

Safety professionals provide technical advice, assurance and challenge. But they cannot independently correct every risk created through engineering, procurement, commercial or management decisions.

Those with authority over such decisions must accept the corresponding responsibilities.

That is the leadership challenge CDM 2024 places before the industry.

The Enforcement Transition Is Not a Holiday From Compliance

According to an industry notice published by the Master Builders Association Malaysia, DOSH has extended its soft-enforcement approach for Parts II and III of CDM 2024 until 1 January 2027.

Part II addresses client duties, while Part III concerns duties relating to designers, contractors and principal duty holders.

The same notice states that Parts IV and V remain subject to full enforcement. Part IV contains general requirements for construction sites, while Part V addresses miscellaneous provisions, including safety and health assistance and site safety supervisors.

This reported enforcement arrangement must be distinguished from the legal commencement of the regulations.

CDM 2024 has been in force since 1 June 2024. An administrative soft-enforcement approach does not, by itself, repeal or suspend statutory obligations.

The reported extension should therefore be treated as an opportunity for organisations to improve implementation, not as permission to postpone compliance.

Clients should review project arrangements. Designers should strengthen design risk management. Contractors should assess their capabilities. Principal duty holders should establish effective coordination systems.

The industry must also recognise that CDM 2024 is not confined to conventional building developments.

Certain construction-related activities within manufacturing plants, industrial facilities, energy installations and brownfield developments may fall within its scope.

However, applicability depends on the statutory definition of construction work and relevant exclusions, including those concerning mineral exploration and extraction.

Not every routine maintenance activity or oil and gas operation automatically falls under CDM 2024.

Where the regulations apply, existing permit-to-work systems, contractor management procedures and operational safety standards may support compliance, but they do not automatically discharge every CDM obligation.

Organisations must assess their actual activities and legal responsibilities.

January 2027 should not be the point when organisations begin taking CDM seriously. It should be the point by which effective implementation is already established.

The Real Test Is Whether Malaysia Changes How Projects Are Delivered

Malaysia has introduced a regulatory framework capable of strengthening construction safety by placing responsibility closer to those who influence project risks.

But regulations alone cannot prevent accidents.

Their effectiveness depends on whether clients make responsible decisions, designers address foreseeable hazards, contractors demonstrate competence and principal duty holders deliver meaningful coordination.

It also depends on whether organisations are prepared to challenge unsafe project arrangements before workers are exposed to their consequences.

Construction will always involve technical complexity, changing conditions and competing commercial pressures.

Those realities make effective risk management more important, not less.

The industry should resist reducing CDM 2024 to another collection of appointment letters, compliance workshops and documentation exercises.

Its success should not be measured primarily by the number of plans prepared or certificates issued.

It should be measured by whether foreseeable risks are eliminated or effectively controlled, whether project decisions are better informed and whether workers are protected from dangers that could reasonably have been prevented.

For too long, the construction industry has concentrated much of its attention on what workers do when they arrive at the site.

CDM 2024 requires greater attention to what clients, designers and project leaders decide before those workers arrive.

A construction fatality may occur on site. But the decisions that made it possible may have been taken months earlier, in a meeting room where nobody was wearing a safety helmet.

That is the uncomfortable reality Malaysia’s construction industry must confront.

The regulations are already in place. The remaining question is whether those with the greatest influence over construction risks are prepared to accept the responsibility that comes with it.

About the Writer

Zuflin Nazli Mohd Ghazali is an occupational safety and health professional with nearly three decades of experience across the oil and gas, manufacturing and construction industries. He holds a degree in Chemical Engineering and a Master’s degree in Industrial Safety Management. He is an Adjunct Lecturer at Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS and a certified occupational safety and health trainer.

He writes on occupational safety, leadership, regulatory governance and organisational accountability.

The views expressed are those of the author in his personal capacity.