Making Construction Safer, Step by Step

Every event involves a build phase. Whether it’s a festival site taking shape over several days, a pop-up exhibition being rigged overnight, or a temporary structure going up in a town square, construction activity is at the heart of how events come to life.

And wherever there’s construction, there’s a legal and practical duty to manage it safely.

That’s where Construction Phase Plans come in.

What is a Construction Phase Plan?

A Construction Phase Plan, or CPP, is a key document that sets out how health and safety will be managed throughout an event’s build or breakdown phase. It defines responsibilities, identifies foreseeable risks and outlines the control measures needed to protect everyone on site, from your crew and contractors to any members of the public nearby.

Under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015, commonly known as CDM 2015, a CPP is a legal requirement for most construction projects, including temporary structures and event builds. It’s not a box-ticking exercise. It’s a working document that should genuinely reflect how your site will be managed.

Why events need them

It’s easy to think of event builds as a different category to ‘real’ construction. They’re often fast-paced, short-lived and driven by creative vision. But the duty of care is exactly the same as it would be on any building site.

Temporary stages, grandstands, barriers, rigging structures and marquees all carry genuine risk if they’re not designed, erected and managed properly. Add in compressed timescales, multiple contractors working in parallel and the physical complexity of large outdoor sites, and the case for structured safety planning becomes very clear.

A well-written CPP doesn’t slow the build down. It makes it run more efficiently.

What a good CPP covers

Every Construction Phase Plan should be tailored to the specific event and site. But at a minimum, it should address:

• The scope of the build and the construction activities involved
• Key roles and responsibilities, including the Principal Contractor
• Site rules, induction requirements and welfare arrangements
• Risk identification across the build programme
• Emergency procedures and first aid arrangements
• Arrangements for managing subcontractors and specialist suppliers
• Communication and coordination between teams

The level of detail required will depend on the scale and complexity of the project. What matters is that the plan is clear, practical and genuinely usable by the people on the ground.

How Hybred Events can help

At Hybred, we work with organisers and production teams to develop CPPs that meet the requirements of CDM 2015 and actually work in practice. We understand the pressures of event delivery, and we know that safety documentation needs to fit into the workflow rather than sit alongside it.

We help you identify the right people for each duty-holder role, assess the risks specific to your site and programme, and produce a plan that your team can use from the first person on site through to the final inspection.

The result is a build phase that’s better coordinated, better communicated and safer for everyone involved.

Good safety is good management.