Who Is Responsible for the Golden Thread on a Construction Site?

The Golden Thread is not owned by one person on site, but responsibility is shared.

The client is ultimately responsible for ensuring the Golden Thread exists and is complete. However, site supervisors, foremen and contractors are responsible for creating much of the evidence that feeds into it.

This includes:


If information is not captured on site, it cannot appear in the Golden Thread later. From a practical point of view, site teams are the main source of Golden Thread evidence.
 
In practice, this means the Golden Thread is built day by day through normal site activity, not through paperwork created at the end of a project. If evidence is not captured when the work happens, it is usually lost or weakened later.

For site teams, the risk is often not doing the work incorrectly, but failing to record it properly. Good installation carried out without records has the same outcome as poor work when it comes to compliance checks and Gateway 3 review.

The most effective way to manage the Golden Thread is to treat recording as part of the task itself. If installing, inspecting or changing something is important enough to do, it is important enough to document at the same time.

Image © London Construction Magazine Limited
Mihai Chelmus
Expert Verification & Authorship: 
Founder, London Construction Magazine | Construction Testing & Investigation Specialist
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