Louis Wustemann looks at what steps, beyond prequalification, can help to ensure that contract staff are not the weak link in your safety chain.

In its 2024 Global Health & Safety Survey, sustainability consultancy ERM looked at the priorities and concerns of health and safety leaders worldwide. One of the focal points of the report was the use of contractors. Among the more than 256 health and safety leaders surveyed, almost two-thirds (63 per cent) said they expected their organisations to increase their use of contractors in the next three years. “The definition of the ‘workforce’ has become increasingly blurred in practical, if not legal, terms as more of the ‘work’ is undertaken by contractor employees,” said ERM.

Contractor safety was one of the top three concerns among the respondents to the survey and 44 per cent said their concern stemmed from the fact that contractors had lower health and safety performance than their own organisations. Three-quarters of the function leaders surveyed said the contractors took on work with a higher risk profile than that of direct employees.

This last point is important. Alongside more benign activities such as catering and cleaning, commonly outsourced tasks include specialist maintenance and repair, including work at height, on electrical systems and in confined spaces. These activities are exactly the classes of tasks that are covered by “life-saving rules” in many organisations; strict codes on acceptable techniques, introduced because they were the most frequent causes of fatalities and life-changing injuries. Alongside these elevated hazards, contracted workers who are not working routinely at the same site face the compounding of risk that comes with work in unfamiliar environments.

Two-thirds (65 per cent) of the safety heads in ERM’s survey said that contractor health and safety was harder to manage than looking after their own employees. This is not surprising; the direct employment relationship gives plenty of opportunity to broadcast and reinforce safety messaging and ideally to develop a safety culture in which employees play an active part in spotting and controlling the risks they and their colleagues face at work. That sort of safety consciousness is harder to develop in employees when the employment relationship is at one remove and their corporate culture is set somewhere else.

But there is no option for senior health and safety managers to shrug their shoulders about contractor safety and just hope for the best. The reason it features as one of the major concerns among ERM’s safety leaders is that in most jurisdictions, as in the UK, dutyholders have a responsibility for anyone working on their sites, regardless of who employs them, and therefore can share liability if they are hurt.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the UK has long recognised this combination of potentially elevated risk and shared liability with its guidance on managing contractors, initially published for the chemicals industry but with principles widely applicable to other sectors.

Prequalified successes

The process of checking whether a potential contractor is appropriately insured and certified to work on your site has become systematised through questionnaire-based prequalification schemes. Too many overlapping schemes for construction and maintenance work emerged in the UK, resulting in a drive by industry bodies to simplify prequalification through the publication of a set of core scheme criteria – intended to promote cross-recognition of schemes which used the core set of questions.

The latest attempt to standardise prequalification is the Common Assessment Standard (CAS), issued by the UK construction industry body Build UK in 2019 and updated periodically since. Currently, the CAS asks 174 questions, of which 39 are on health and safety arrangements. Some of these are construction-specific, covering duties under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations, but others cover more general aspects of good safety practice such as training and staff consultation channels.

Prequalification, based on the standard question set is necessary but not sufficient, says Bridget Leathley, writer, consultant and trainer in health and safety, including contractor management. A questionnaire will give you assurance that a potential contractor understands the importance of health and safety provisions, she says, but it is an arm’s length way of checking suitability. If you want to know whether they understand the risks associated with a site like your own, she says it is best to ask for contact details of managers at organisations they have done similar work for.

“I think that personal approach of getting references from other clients to make sure they can do that type of work is probably best for a lot of jobs,” she says.

Once a contractor has passed the suitability test, the next level of checking happens when their operatives arrive on site. Someone needs to ensure that the qualified and competent individuals who have been approved to do the work are actually the people who turn up on the day. Bridget has come across organisations without this on-the-day filter, where “as long as the van had the right logo on it, it was waved through”.

Ideally, the person who is responsible for specifying the work inside the client organisation should be there to greet the contractors, set out the safety rules for the site and who to contact in an emergency. “What I see so often is that the whole induction is left to the guy on security, or the woman on reception or whatever,” she says.

Bridget advises that it is useful for whoever is responsible for welcoming the contractors to add a basic competence check: “It’s about making sure that you have a conversation where you ask: ‘how risky is this job? What could go wrong? And what are you going to do if it goes wrong?’”

For belt and braces, she suggests that where there is no direct supervision, someone on site should check that once the contractors have started work, they have taken the right precautions. If the person checking will not be experienced in health and safety practice, the preparation stage should allow for this with a request for details of the way scaffolding will be erected or the PPE that the operatives will be wearing, ideally with photographs so this can be supplied to local management and checked off when the contractors start work.

Equal treatment

Prequalification and basic competence checks are the fundamentals of reducing the risks of bringing contractors on to site but many clients want to go beyond that. Organisations trying to boost their safety and health standards above the levels of legal compliance spend effort and money to promote safety consciousness among their own workers. When medium and long-term contracts entail contractor staff on their premises for extended periods, these clients can end up with a de-facto two-tier safety culture.

Phill Roberts is Regional Operational Safety Manager at National Grid and former Head of Safety Culture at facilities management specialist Mitie. He says the issue of contractor management needs reframing. “My question is always ‘why are you looking to control contractors?’” he says. “You're actually looking to control your operation.”

Managing safety risks should not involve two separate standards, he says. “If you are looking at your internal controls a certain way, really, that's the way you should look at your external controls … So forget that they are contractors [and think] how would you set your team to work in that area?”

Lawrence Webb, Chief Safety Officer for the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and IOSH past President, echoes this approach of trying to remove the distinction between contractors and a direct workforce, saying: “If you've got safety campaigns or events or whatever, bring them in, don't have them standing outside in the cold. Bring them into to what you're trying to do… be as inclusive as possible.”

Phill Roberts agrees and says he would extend the inclusivity to all safety cultural programmes, such as behavioural training and hazard-spotting reward schemes. And where that is difficult to arrange for any reason, the client should at least set up some sort of separate equivalent scheme for contractors, designed to have the same impact.

But the best engagement and safety performance comes when the company is able to blur the boundaries between directly-employed and contracted staff, he believes, to the point where the contract staff feel psychologically safe. The optimum, he says, is: “When you can say: ‘You are a part of our people. You are a part of our operation. We find you just as important as everyone else, and we want you to be able to talk to us’”. With longer-term contracts, this closeness can spread up the management hierarchy to the point where the parties are able to talk about the relationship as a partnership.

Lawrence Webb suggests that for these longer-term contracting relationships, potential partnerships are worth looking for from the start. Just as Bridget Leathley suggests bolstering basic prequalification with questions about experience in specific work environments, Lawrence argues that seeking contractors with a good cultural fit saves effort in trying to influence contract employees’ behaviour. “It always makes sense to try and match yourself with organisations who've got a similar culture to your own, because that just makes it a lot easier,” he says. “There's a piece around taking time early doors to do some research, so you know you've got organisations that see the world in a similar way to you.”

But he brings the discussion back to earth with a final reminder that however ambitious an organisation is about bringing contractor staff up to an elevated level of safety awareness and engagement, the deciding factor will be how well its efforts have rubbed off on its own staff. “It will be your people around them that set the tone. So, if you're saying one thing [to contractors], and your people are doing something else or leading in a different way … you'll be constantly trying to find ways to pull them around; it will become really frustrating.”
 

Louis Wustemann is a writer and editor on sustainability and health and safety. He was previously Head of Regulatory Magazines at LexisNexis UK, publishing IOSH Magazine, Health and Safety at Work magazine and The Environmentalist among other titles. He is a trustee of the One Percent Safer Foundation.