What CAE Is, and When You're Legally Required to Have It

The lift engineer had been working down in the pit for a good while before the building's president came down and asked who had let him in. Nobody had. He'd carried his own key for years, since the service call was monthly and he always came and went the same way. What neither of them realised was that, in that very moment, the building was on the wrong side of the law — and that if the man had hurt himself, the first name on the file would have been the president's.

This is not some far-fetched scenario. In the buildings I sit down with, it's closer to the rule than the exception. Coordination of Business Activities sounds like something reserved for industrial estates, major construction sites and firms with a safety department of their own. And yet it lands squarely on your residents' association every time a lift technician, a cleaning firm or the aerial engineer comes through the door.

So let's cut to it: what CAE actually is, when it puts you under a legal duty, and who carries the can if it gets ignored.

CAE in a single sentence

CAE stands for coordinación de actividades empresariales — Coordination of Business Activities. The principle behind it is mostly common sense: when workers from different companies share the same space, somebody has to make sure they don't put each other in danger. That's the whole idea. Everything else is procedure and paperwork, but that's the heart of it.

The duty comes from Article 24 of Spain's Occupational Risk Prevention Act (Law 31/1995) and is fleshed out by Royal Decree 171/2004. That decree is what names the roles that matter and parcels out the obligations according to who is who. It has been on the books for more than twenty years, so we're not talking about anything new — we're talking about something that has been enforceable for two decades and that most associations simply have no idea applies to them.

The trigger is always the same, and it's worth committing to memory: overlap. The moment two or more companies (or self-employed contractors) have people working in the same workplace at the same time, the duty to coordinate kicks in. It doesn't hinge on the size of the building. It doesn't hinge on there being construction work. It hinges on the overlap.

When it genuinely becomes mandatory

The decree draws a line between three situations. They sound alike, but the obligations shift quite a bit from one to the next:

• Companies that simply overlap in a space without any of them owning or controlling it. Each one has to cooperate and share its own risks with the others.
• There is a party in control of the workplace — someone with the authority to manage the space and make it available to others. That party takes on extra duties: informing and instructing.
• There is a principal employer — one who hires others to carry out work that forms part of its own core activity, on its own premises. This is where the strongest duty appears: oversight.

I'll spare you the theory and go straight to the case that takes up ninety per cent of my time, which is almost certainly the one you care about.

The case I meet most often: your residents' association

For years there was a haze over whether a residents' association (a comunidad de propietarios) even counted as an "employer" for these purposes. That question has been settled. In Ruling 486/2022 of 27 May, Spain's Supreme Court made it plain that a residents' association qualifies as an economic agent and, therefore, as the party in control of the workplace.

Which workplace? The communal areas. The entrance hall, the stairwell, the courtyard, the roof, the machine room, the lift pit. The moment your association hires somebody to work in any of them, it becomes the controller of that space in the eyes of health-and-safety law. And with that role come duties.

The striking part is that it takes no major works to set this off. The everyday services already do:

• The cleaning company that comes round each week.
• The lift maintenance firm, which lets itself in with its own key.
• The gardeners, the pest-control people, the firm that checks the fire extinguishers.
• And of course any special levy for works: a façade refurbishment, a re-piping job, fitting solar panels.

What the association actually has to do

As the party in control, an association can't just sign a few forms and forget about it. There are three duties to meet, and they're met in order:

Inform. Before anything starts, you have to tell each company about the hazards in your building that could affect them: where the electrical panel is, whether the roof can be walked on, how you get out in an emergency, which areas are dangerous. When those hazards are serious or very serious, that information must be given in writing.

Ask for — and exchange — information the other way. Each company has to tell you about its own risks, the ones specific to the job it's doing. This runs both ways: it isn't the association informing blindly, it's a two-way exchange.

Give instructions and, where needed, keep watch. With all of that on the table, the association issues instructions to the companies working on site. And when the work calls for it — picture a job with several trades on the go at once — that's when you bring in someone to genuinely coordinate and, if appropriate, a designated safety presence on site while the work is under way.

This is where the figure of the CAE coordinator comes in. It isn't a rubber stamp or a tick-box: it's the person who organises all of this, documents it and answers for it when an inspector turns up. It is, precisely, the work I do for the associations I look after.

And if something goes wrong, who answers for it?

This is the point where the conversation turns serious, and where I watch more than one president's face change.

Liability sits with the association as a body, and its legal representative is the president. There's a common misconception worth clearing up here: this is not automatically covered by your managing agent. The agent manages, advises and, above all, has a duty to warn the association that the obligation exists. But the responsibility for making the CAE happen — and for appointing whoever runs it — lies with the association itself. It doesn't transfer simply because you have an agent.

So what's at stake if it's ignored? The consequences come in tiers. A labour inspection can issue a formal report and lead to fines that are anything but token. If there's an accident on top of that, and it's shown there was no coordination, things can escalate into civil liability to make good the harm and, in the worst cases — a worker exposed to a serious hazard — even criminal liability. I've no interest in cheap scaremongering, but I'm not going to sugar-coat it either: the risk is real, and it falls on named individuals.

The mistake I see again and again

It's nearly always the same one: mistaking CAE for collecting folders. Someone asks each company for its "safety paperwork", files it away in a digital drawer and considers the matter closed. That isn't coordinating. That's collecting documents.

Coordinating means the information flows before work begins, the instructions reach the people who have to follow them, the companies are checked to be who they claim to be with properly trained workers, and the whole thing is logged in a way that holds up under inspection. The difference between the two, as a rule, doesn't show… until it does.

Jorge Muñiz · Chartered Building Engineer. Coordination of Business Activities for residents' associations in Barcelona.