The Duty Nobody Can See Themselves Fulfilling

A client signs off a higher-risk residential scheme. The principal designer is appointed, the principal contractor is appointed, and the project runs. Eighteen months later a Gateway submission comes back with questions about a change made in week 34. Nobody can say who approved it, or what else it touched.

Legally, that is the client's problem. Practically, the client had no way of knowing it was becoming one.

This is not a criticism of any individual client, architect, or contractor. It is a structural feature of how the golden thread duty is discharged across the industry today. It is worth naming plainly, because naming it is the first step to fixing it.

What the law actually says

The golden thread is a legal requirement, not an industry convention, and the specific duties are more precise than most summaries suggest.

During design and construction, regulation 31 of the Building (Higher-Risk Buildings Procedures) (England) Regulations 2023 is headed, simply, "Golden thread". It requires the client to create and maintain an electronic facility holding golden thread information, and to ensure procedures exist so that everyone designing or carrying out the work can access and maintain it. The information must be electronic, transferable without loss, accurate and up to date, readable, secure from unauthorised access, and changed only through procedures that record "the person who made the change and the date of that change".

Alongside it, regulation 19 of the same instrument, headed "Change control: record-keeping", places a duty on the principal contractor to create and maintain a change control log. Each controlled change must be recorded with who recorded it, what changed, why, whether it is a recordable, notifiable or major change, what advice was sought, which documents it affects, and a compliance explanation showing how the change keeps the work compliant.

Once the building is occupied, the duty changes hands. Section 88 of the Building Safety Act 2022 requires an accountable person to keep prescribed information and copies of prescribed documents in accordance with prescribed standards, and so far as possible to keep that information up to date.

So across the full lifecycle, someone in a client-like role is named in law as answerable for the record existing and being accurate. That is not an administrative footnote. It carries real liability.

One point deserves precision, because it is often stated too loosely. The duty is not the client's alone. It is held alongside the principal designer and the principal contractor, each with their own obligations. And per RIBA guidance, a designer, very often the architect acting as principal designer, should be making the client aware of the client's own duties before design work begins. That guidance notes the obligation is not new; it existed under CDM 2015 and continues under the Act.

The structural problem

Here is the part that does not get said plainly enough.

The client's duty is to ensure the record exists and is accurate. But the client does not create the record. It is created, entry by entry, by dozens of people across different firms: the architect's design decisions, the structural engineer's calculations, the fire engineer's strategy, the contractor's change control log, and every subcontractor capturing installation evidence, often on their own phone, in their own format, using their own judgement about what is worth keeping.

The client is answerable for all of that adding up to a complete and accurate golden thread. On most projects today, the client has no direct way to see whether it is adding up to anything at all. They see what gets escalated, what a report summarises, or what a contractor says in a progress meeting. They do not see the record being built, or not built, as it happens.

Which leads to an uncomfortable question:

How can a duty be meaningfully discharged by someone structurally unable to observe whether it is being met, until a submission is rejected, a certificate is delayed, or an incident forces a retrospective reconstruction of what happened?

Why more reporting is not the answer

The instinct is to ask for more reporting. Monthly returns, a compliance dashboard, a standing item on the progress agenda.

Reporting after the fact does not solve a visibility problem. It adds a delay between something going wrong and the client finding out. A report is an assertion about the record, produced by the same people who maintain it, at a moment of their choosing. If the underlying entries are thin, the report can still look healthy.

The fix has to be structural. The client needs a live view into the same record every dutyholder is contributing to, not a periodically assembled summary of it. That is a different thing from a document repository. A system that stores files somebody remembered to upload is not meaningfully different from the folder of paper a client was handed before the Act existed. A system that shows the state of the record itself, who has recorded what, what is missing, what changed and why, is the difference between a duty that exists on paper and one that can actually be discharged.

Where this leaves the industry

Most guidance on the golden thread focuses on what information must be kept. Far less attention has gone to who can actually see whether it is being kept, while the project is live rather than after the fact.

That second question deserves more attention from clients, from architects acting as principal designer, and from the software vendors serving this market. It is the question that decides whether the golden thread is a genuine safety mechanism or a compliance fiction that only becomes visible as broken during a Gateway rejection or a regulator's inquiry.

If you hold this duty, the test is not whether your project has a system. It is whether you could open it right now, without asking anyone, and see what was recorded this week.

Sources

• Building Safety Act 2022, sections 65, 88 and 90
• The Building (Higher-Risk Buildings Procedures) (England) Regulations 2023, regulations 19 and 31
• The Higher-Risk Buildings (Keeping and Provision of Information etc.) (England) Regulations 2024
• RIBA guidance, "Building Safety Act for architects and domestic projects", 28 March 2024

Statutory wording quoted above is taken from the instruments as published on legislation.gov.uk. Interpretation of what those duties mean in practice is ours, and is flagged as such throughout.