The recently published ISO 19650-6:2025 standard provides a structured approach to organising and sharing health and safety data, ensuring that risks, hazards, and mitigations are recorded and communicated consistently between dutyholders such as designers, contractors, and asset managers.
It's easy to spot parallels with the Building Safety Act 2022 and the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015. While these three frameworks sit in different domains - standards, legislation, and regulations, they interlock around information, safety, and accountability in construction projects. Here’s a short overview on how they relate:
ISO 19650-6
Part of the international ISO 19650 series on managing information over the lifecycle of built assets using BIM. Specifically, ISO 19650-6 deals with health and safety information management and sets out processes for how safety-related data should be created, shared, and maintained digitally across the project lifecycle. In practice, it underpins the “golden thread” concept of accurate, accessible safety information.Building Safety Act 2022
The Act was introduced in response to the Grenfell Tower fire after a lengthy period of consultation. It establishes legal duties for Dutyholders and Accountable Persons to maintain a golden thread of information for higher-risk buildings. It requires transparent information flow from design through to occupation, with strong regulatory oversight via the Building Safety Regulator. The Act is closely aligned with the principles in ISO 19650-6, since both stress structured, reliable digital safety information.
Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015
These regulations are the health and safety legislation for construction projects in the UK. They place legal duties on clients, designers, and contractors to manage risks from the earliest design stages through to on-site construction and handover. The regulations focus on ensuring risks are eliminated or controlled and that safety-critical information is passed on to those who need it.
These separate frameworks interconnect in that ISO 19650-6 provides the framework and processes for managing safety information digitally. The Building Safety Act makes it a legal requirement to maintain that information (the golden thread), particularly for higher-risk residential buildings. The CDM Regulations provide the legal duties and responsibilities for safety management during design and construction, which rely on that information being created, communicated, and acted on.
On a live project, CDM dutyholders are responsible for managing risks, the Building Safety Act requires a golden thread of safety information to be maintained, and ISO 19650-6 provides the digital processes to manage and share that information. The same organisation or individual could be appointed as Principal Designer under both CDM and the Building Safety Act, but they’d have to meet two overlapping sets of duties (risk management + regulatory compliance)