Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development: Consolidating the main responsibility of the construction market operators and clarifying the primary responsibility of the construction units for quality and safety.

Recently, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development's Market Supervision Department issued the "Notice on Further Improving the Construction Market Supervision Mechanism and Continuously Optimizing the Construction Market Environment" (Draft for Solicitation of Opinions). The draft points out the need to strengthen the responsibility of construction market operators. It clarifies the primary responsibility for quality and safety of construction units, strictly enforces basic construction procedures and contracting systems, implements the project legal person responsibility system, and fully fulfills project management responsibilities. It emphasizes the responsibility of entities such as engineering surveying, design, construction, and supervision, improves the quality and safety management system, and enhances the construction safety pre-prevention mechanism. It strengthens the accountability of project leaders, strictly enforces the quality and safety "veto" system, imposes administrative penalties such as fines, suspension of practice, and revocation of qualifications on project leaders responsible for quality and safety accidents and those involved in illegal activities, and publicizes them to society to effectively deter and regulate the behavior of practitioners. The original text is as follows: Notice on Further Improving the Construction Market Supervision Mechanism and Continuously Optimizing the Construction Market Environment (Draft for Solicitation of Opinions) To the departments of housing and urban-rural development of provinces and autonomous regions, the housing and urban-rural development (management) committees of municipalities directly under the Central Government, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Planning and Natural Resources, and the Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps: In order to implement the spirit of the "Opinions of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on Accelerating the Construction of a Unified National Market" and the "Opinions of the General Office of the State Council on Innovating and Improving the System and Mechanism to Promote the Normative and Healthy Development of Tendering and Bidding Markets," further strengthen the responsibility of construction market operators, enhance construction market supervision, optimize the construction market environment, and accelerate the establishment of a construction market supervision mechanism characterized by wide entry, strict management, and severe punishment, the following notices are now provided on related work. 1. Strengthen dynamic supervision of the construction market. Optimize market access services, improve the convenience of the review and approval of qualifications and registration of professional technical personnel of construction enterprises, actively explore intelligent approval. Strengthen dynamic verification of enterprise qualifications, increase verification frequency, mark enterprises that do not meet qualification standards as "abnormal qualifications" on the national construction market supervision public service platform; implement key supervision of marked enterprises and enterprises with engineering quality and safety responsibility incidents, arrears of contractor payments or migrant worker wages, subcontracting, illegal subcontracting, and other illegal activities, strengthen daily supervision and inspection of the construction projects undertaken by the aforementioned enterprises, and deal with illegal and irregular problems promptly when discovered. Increase efforts to clear out construction market, seriously investigate and punish enterprises or individuals involved in construction quality and safety responsibility incidents, fraudulently obtaining qualifications or registration qualifications, and maintain order in the construction market. 2. Strengthen the responsibility of construction market operators. Clarify the primary responsibility for quality and safety of construction units, strictly enforce basic construction procedures and contracting systems, implement the project legal person responsibility system, and fully fulfill project management responsibilities. Strengthen the responsibility of units such as engineering surveying, design, construction, and supervision, improve the quality and safety management system, and enhance the construction safety pre-prevention mechanism. Strengthen the accountability of project leaders, strictly enforce the quality and safety "veto" system, impose administrative penalties such as fines, suspension of practice, revocation of qualifications, etc., on project leaders responsible for quality and safety incidents and those involved in illegal activities, and publicly disclose these actions to society to effectively deter and regulate the behavior of practitioners. 3. Strictly manage registered and licensed personnel. Improve platform functions, strengthen information disclosure, publicly announce the number of changes in registration units and registration tracks on the national construction market supervision public service platform. Strengthen the management of changes in professional technical personnel registration, regulate the declaration of enterprise qualifications, for registered personnel who change registration units two or more times within one year, they will not be able to apply for registration again under the commitment system; when registered personnel apply for cancellation or change, warning reminders will be given to enterprises with registered personnel that no longer meet standards after cancellation or change; registered personnel can only apply for qualifications approved by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development for one enterprise within 2 years. 4. Promote quality-based selection of construction project services. Optimize the evaluation method of engineering services projects such as surveying, design, and supervision, focus on technical factors, emphasize the evaluation of project leaders and their team capabilities, technical proposals, and other contents, increase the weight of technical standards and reduce the weight of bid prices. Explore reforming evaluation rules, separate technical evaluation and bid price evaluation, conduct technical evaluation first, then evaluate the bid prices of bidders who pass the technical evaluation, and finally conduct comprehensive assessments to prevent malicious low-price competition. Explore incentive mechanisms for engineering services prices, encourage high-quality and priced services, reasonably determine service prices based on the content, depth, and quality of engineering services, and create a market environment that values quality. 5. Actively promote the reform of separating bidding and evaluation of construction projects. Further explore and improve the system of separating bidding and evaluation of construction projects, clarify the responsibilities and positioning of evaluation committees, evaluation committees should provide clear and specific evaluation opinions based on the bidding documents regarding the technical solutions, bid prices, etc., and recommend qualified candidates to the bidder. Improve the standard-setting mechanism of the bidder, the bidder should scientifically establish bidding rules, embodying requirements for standardization, transparency, and democratic decision-making, establish a sound internal procedures, decision constraints, and risk prevention mechanisms, determine the winning bidder according to the evaluation committee's evaluation opinions in accordance with regulations, ensuring fair bidding procedures and results. Strictly implement the requirements of establishing a unified national market, and avoid setting up local barriers through separating bidding and evaluation. 6. Regulate construction market contracting activities. Standardize engineering contracting behaviors, construction units shall not subcontract engineering projects in parts, or subcontract them to units without corresponding qualifications. Standardize engineering subcontracting behaviors, the general contractor is responsible for all construction activities of the project and should carry out engineering subcontracting activities legally, should not transfer all contracted projects to other units or subcontract the projects parallely after decommissioning, should not subcontract the main structural projects to other units, should not subcontract projects to units without the necessary qualifications; for the construction and service subcontracts and the procurement of goods in state-owned enterprises, the procurement methods should be selected according to relevant regulations, and according to the principle of the one who contracts is responsible, strict management of subcontractors and goods suppliers should be carried out to ensure the quality and safety of engineering projects. 7. Strictly implement the requirements for engineering payment. Regulate the payment of progress payments for engineering projects, government-invested project construction units should strictly implement the requirements of the "Regulations on Government Investment" (State Council Decree No. 712) and the "Notice on Improving the Settlement of Construction Engineering Price (Caijian [2022] No. 183), in addition to the statutory reserves of construction quality guarantee deposits, progress payments for engineering should be made in full and timely; before the completion acceptance of the project, the construction unit should pay the engineering payment as specified in the contract; construction enterprises can stipulate in the contract, if the payment of progress payments is lower than the agreed proportion in the contract, the construction enterprise should not sign on the completion acceptance materials, if the signing procedures are incomplete, the construction unit should not organize the completion acceptance of the project. Improve the efficiency of engineering payment settlement, government and state-owned investment projects should not use the audit conclusions of audit institutions as the basis for engineering settlement, construction units should not refuse or delay the settlement and payment of engineering payments on the grounds of incomplete final accounts audits. Implement guarantees for engineering payment, strengthen risk identification and monitoring, prevent the risk of engineering payment. Promote the substitution of guarantees for cash deposits, for projects that must be tendered according to law, the tenderer shall not require the bidder or winning bidder to pay cash bid security or performance bond, contracting units can use the form of bonds (insurance) to replace cash for storing guarantees for paying wages to migrant workers, and use bank guarantees (insurance) to replace quality assurance deposits. 8. Accelerate the construction of the construction market credit system. Regulate the work of credit assessment in the construction market, local and enterprise barriers should not be set under the guise of credit assessment, all types of operators should not be treated differently, specific administrative district performance and establishment of local branches should not be used as scoring criteria for credit evaluation. Strengthen the application of credit evaluation results, promote the use of credit evaluation results in market access and industry regulation, encourage construction market operators to actively use credit evaluation results. Establish and improve the credit restoration mechanism, encourage market entities to actively correct untrustworthy behavior, eliminate negative influences, and improve the efficiency of credit management. 9. Strengthen digital and intelligent supervision of the construction market. Strengthen the supervision of bidding and tendering, accelerate the interconnection and sharing between the bidding and tendering trading platform and the construction market supervision information platform, explore the implementation of informatization warning, conduct in-depth analysis of transaction projects, entities involved, and distinguish illegal behaviors, comprehensively utilize new regulatory methods, implement scientific, accurate, and efficient intelligent online supervision. Strengthen the linkage between the construction market and construction sites, further improve the integration of the national construction market supervision public service platform with the provincial construction market supervision integrated work platform, and the national construction worker management service information platform, engineering quality and safety supervision information system, national investment project online approval and supervision platform, and other management platforms to achieve mutual sharing, strengthen data analysis and informatization warnings, timely identify clues to subcontracting, illegal subcontracting and other illegal activities, and deal with them in accordance with laws and regulations, enhancing the governance capacity of the construction industry. Localities should further raise their political positioning, fully understand the importance of strengthening construction market supervision in promoting the high-quality development of the construction industry, clarify work goals, focus on key tasks, strengthen responsibility implementation, ensure that all work is implemented effectively, establish a collaborative supervision mechanism, enhance supervision efficiency, standardize market order, and create a unified, open, and competitively orderly construction market environment. This article is selected from the official website of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, edited by GMTEight: Feng Qiuyi.