Did Anybody Tell You You're the Principal Designer?

A plain English guide for clients approaching a completion certificate on a higher-risk building. What you were supposed to have done, what can still be fixed, and what cannot. 54 pages, written for the person paying.

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

Did Anybody Tell You You're the Principal Designer?

A plain English guide for anyone approaching a completion certificate on a higher-risk building, who is not certain what was supposed to happen.

Ivan Young, Principal Designer (Building Regulations), England. Edition 1, 2026.

If nobody was appointed as Principal Designer in writing, you are the Principal Designer.

Not your architect. Not your contractor. You.

That is not an opinion. Where a client fails to make that appointment, the law requires the client to fulfil those duties themselves until somebody is appointed. There is no gap. The duties moved to you on the day you failed to appoint, and they have been with you ever since.

Most people reading this will not have known that.

Who this is for

You are paying for a tall residential building. You need a completion certificate before anybody can move in. You are starting to be asked for documents you do not have, signatures you do not understand, and evidence of things nobody told you to record.

This book is written for you. Not for your consultant. For you.

Why you are in this position

There is no point in this regime where anybody writes to a client and explains their duties. The regulator does not. The council does not. Your solicitor does not mention it. Nothing arrives in the post.

The law simply attaches duties to you the moment you commission work on a building of this kind, and assumes you already know.

Meanwhile the contractor assumed the architect had it, the architect assumed they were appointed for design and not for a statutory role, and the consultant you did appoint was appointed for something else. Everybody acted reasonably and the duty sat with nobody.

This book is not written to tell you off. It is written because you cannot ask for help with a duty you have never heard of.

The fact everything turns on

From the book:

At the end there is no equivalent. If the regulator is not satisfied, it must refuse. Not may. Must. There is no conditional certificate. There is nothing to negotiate. There is no arrangement where you get the certificate and promise to sort something out afterwards. And the consequences arrive all at once. The building is finished. It cannot be occupied. It cannot earn. Everything owed on it is still owed.

What is in it

A twenty minute check. Fifteen questions you can answer yourself, with no technical knowledge and no documents to hand. Count your no answers and the book tells you where you stand.

What you were supposed to have done. Six duties, each explained the same way. What the duty was. Why it exists. What happens if it was not done.

What the completion certificate actually asks for. The two separate hurdles, the three things the regulator must be satisfied about, everything you have to send, and the four items that cause the most trouble.

What you personally sign. Nine documents, several of them statements about things you were supposed to have done yourself. Including the two that need thinking about before you sign anything else.

The two things that take longest. Both depend on other people. Both are routinely discovered far too late. Start them this week.

What can still be fixed, and what cannot. With a single test that lets you sort your own problems: can it be created now, truthfully?

What to do now. Three lists. This week. This month. Before you apply.

A plain English glossary. Thirty terms, no jargon.

How it is written

Every term is explained the first time it appears. Every part ends with a short version in four or five lines. There is a two page summary of the whole book at the front.

If you read only the summary and the short versions, you get the entire argument in about six pages.

Where a rule number is given, it is so you or your adviser can look it up. You do not need to read a single regulation to use this book.

What it does not do

It tells you where you stand. It does not tell you how to do the technical work, and it is not trying to.

Working out whether a particular change needed to be notified. Knowing what each of the five documents is supposed to contain. Running the checks a competent professional would run. Those are not things a client does, and squeezing them in would make this book longer without making it more useful to you.

Where you reach one of those points, the book says so and tells you where the full treatment is.

Scope

England only. Wales operates a separate regime with different rules, different numbering, different deadlines and a different appeal route. Almost every rule number in this book is wrong for a Welsh building.

Gateway 3. For a project already under construction or complete. If you have not yet applied for permission to start, this is not your book yet, and your position is far more recoverable than the reader it is written for.

Not legal advice. It is a plain English description of regulatory duties. Where your position is serious, take advice from somebody competent.

If you need more than this

The Gateway Bible is the full professional manual for this regime. It is written for the person you appoint rather than for you, and it covers everything this book points at but deliberately does not explain.

Two editions. England, and Wales.