Contractor management: prequalified successes
Bridget looks at the questions to ask of people who come onto your site.
First published in Health and Safety at Work Magazine, November 2014. I’ve provided a more recent case study, and updated the table of example SSiP schemes, as new ones have come and old ones have gone. I’ve also added a note on PAS 91 and the Common Assessment Standard, Thanks to the original contributors for approving my re-use of their quotes, and to Paul Reeve for providing some updates.
You can't contract out your liability: case studies
The quote that animal feed producer Provimi obtained for repairs to a warehouse roof from an experienced roofer — who presumably included the cost of safeguards for working on a fragile surface — was £20,000 higher than the one from maintenance company Riley & Sons. Mr Riley had no track record with fragile roofs and took no measures to safeguard his worker, who fell through a roof light and fractured two vertebrae.
Riley was fined, but Provimi landed a fine five times as big for failing to protect the worker, plus improvement notices for the failures to control fragile roof work and to have effective arrangements for appointing competent contractors.
The Provimi case was in 2012, before the 2016 sentencing guidelines. In a more recent case the brewer Carlsberg was fined £3 million following the death of a contractor, who died during work involving multiple contractors. The principal contractor, Crowley Carbon, had been appointed to manage an energy efficiency project. Sub-contractors were attempting to remove an old compressor from a refrigeration system using an overhead hoist. It got stuck, and David Chandler and David Beak came over to help. Suddenly, the ammonia exploded from the pipe, hitting Mr Chandler in the face. Refrigeration engineers from Crowley Carbon hadn’t checked that the ammonia was safely isolated. David Beak claimed that no one had warned him or his colleagues to take care around the pipes. Crowley Carbon UK Ltd was charged under the Health and Safety at Work Act, but the company was placed into compulsory administration before court proceedings began, so we will never know what the penalty would have been for the contractor – probably significantly less than £3 million.
Every month there are prosecutions such as this, where clients falsely think that contracting out work is the same as contracting out liability, where responsibilities between client and contractor (and subcontractors) aren’t defined, where accidents occur and, in most cases, client fines are higher than those paid by the contractors.
Increased use of contractors
The outsourcing business model that developed in the last quarter of the 20th century and simple economies of scale mean no workplace is free of contactors for any extended period. Contractors include:
- long-term embedded workers such as cleaners, caterers and security
- periodic or seasonal contractors, to check emergency lighting or service fire extinguishers, or to fill a short-term peak in demand such as additional pickers and packers at Christmas, extra machinists to cover a large order, or porters to support an office move.
- occasional workers filling a vending machine or fixing a photocopier.
How to manage contractors
The HSE (HSG159) sets out a five step plan for managing contractors:
- Step 1: Planning.
- Step 2: Choosing a contractor.
- Step 3: Contractors working on site.
- Step 4: Keeping a check.
- Step 5: Reviewing the work.
This article will look at steps 1 and 2 (planning and selection), and a second article will cover the other three.
These steps should not be confused with the stage 1 and stage 2 contractor assessment under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations (CDM). For projects covered by CDM, the stage 1 and stage 2 criteria should be considered in both the planning and choosing steps, and again in the review step.
More is less
Many larger organisations have an approved supplier list, from which managers must choose contractors. Some businesses have their own system for allowing contractors onto this list; others use third party prequalification schemes.
When Ian Meredith of safety training firm CIM Associates UK was the compliance manager for Turner FM he inherited a list of 10,000 contracting organisations. “It was time consuming and unreliable,” he recalls. “People were spending time assessing contractors rather than responding to client needs.”
Ian Meredith worked with SAFEcontractor to adapt its prequalification process to meet Turner FM’s need for a flexible way of managing small contractors — with fewer than five staff — as well as the larger ones. Speaking to me in 2014 for HSW magazine he explained “We saved £15,000 a year on paper alone. In addition, we cut the time spent on dealing with contractors by 50%.”
The process of restricting the number of contractors, and their use of subcontractors, is likely to reduce risk in itself, since the fewer businesses you ask to conform to your safety standards, the lower the chance that one of them will fall short.
Though prequalification schemes such as SafeContractor — see Box — are good at weeding out the poorest of contractors, one problem for even the best ones is that there are so many. The Safety Schemes in Procurement (SSIP) initiative has tried to reduce duplicated contractor effort by encouraging cross-recognition between existing schemes.
But many organisations, including local authorities, still insist on membership of a specific scheme. As the client, if you specify a prequalification scheme, be clear why you have asked for that particular one, or you risk weeding out a suitable contractor who does not want to spend more time form filling and pay more fees to gain another accreditation. If you are not looking at construction contractors, don’t demand a construction-based prequalification.
Box: Safety Schemes in procurement
Under the SSIP umbrella, different schemes have different levels of approval. The SSiP website explains how schemes ‘deem to satisfy’ criteria work. Here are a few of the SSiP schemes. I updated this in 2023, by checking a selection on the SSIP list. Many have gone since the first version of the article, so always check on the scheme website.
| Scheme | Industry |
|---|---|
| Contractors Health and Safety Scheme (CHAS) | All; but particularly popular with local authorities |
| Safety Management Assessment Scheme (SMAS) | All, but focuses on house building |
| SafeContractorfrom Alcumus | All |
| SafeHire Certification from Hire Association Europe | Specific to the plant, tool and equipment hire sector |
| Pre Qualification Scheme (PQS) | Focus is on construction, but question set adapted for non-construction, eg cleaners, trainers and consultants |
Examples of SSiP
PAS 91 and the Common Assessment Standard (2023 update)
The CHAS (Contractors Health and Safety Assessment Scheme) website lists both PAS 91 and the Common Assessment Standard (CAS) as means for contractors to demonstrate minimum health and safety standards. Paul Reeve, head of business services at the Electrical Contractors Association (ECA) speaking in 2023 explained how he believes that PAS 91 will eventually be replaced with CAS. As with PAS 91, CAS recognises existing SSIP assessments for the health and safety element. Recognition is also given in CAS to ISO 45001 (the ISO standard for occupational health and safety management) and ISO 9001 (for quality management).
“PAS 91 was a good start but it was only a first go at a standard question set and it wasn’t possible to assess against it. It’s out of date and too limited in what you can do with it. The Common Assessment Standard has more scope, and hence all the features necessary to enable both assessment and cross-recognition. It’s already big in mainstream construction.”
Paul points out that the support CAS received from the UK Cabinet Office in March 2023 is likely to “further speed up the decline in the use of PAS 91.”
The revised policy procurement note (PPN 03/23) ‘Standard Selection Questionnaire (SQ)’ is clear that both PAS 91 and CAS are acceptable, and should be used “for works contracts, including the procurement of mixed contracts that include supplies and services” in place of the (previous) “standard SQ template in pre-qualification of bidders.”
You can download the CAS from Build UK. You should always download the latest version from Build UK, as many links directly to a pdf of CAS point to older versions.
You can download PAS 91:2013+A1:2017 from BSI if you register a free account.
Halfway there
Be aware too that prequalification schemes are not enough. SSIP makes a clear statement that accreditation shows only that an organisation has “achieved the initial threshold of competence” and using these schemes will not absolve clients of liability. As many people, contractors and clients, who use these schemes will admit off the record “they are just paperwork”. They do not check that a contractor can do a particular job, only that they have the right health and safety paperwork.
Clive Johnson, head of health and safety at Land Securities, speaking in 2014 said they would accept any of the SSIP member schemes as a prequalification, because their own next step was more rigorous. “The reliable checks have to be organisation specific and ideally made face-to-face.”
Johnson takes the HSE / Institute of Directors leadership checklist (INDG 417) with him when he visits organisations that want to go on Land’s approved suppliers list.
“It’s a really good tool for opening a conversation with potential contractors and getting a feel for the culture of the organisation, not just what they say on paper,” he notes. “In return, it’s a free gap analysis for the contractor. If they don’t get onto the approved suppliers list they know the reasons why, and can improve.”
DIY
An alternative to prequalification schemes is to develop your own checklist to vet candidate companies. This will let you tailor your requirements, but could take longer.
Your own checklist would let you see whether a contractor’s approach matches your own — but, as with specifying a particular prequalification scheme, you may deter some otherwise satisfactory contractors. Consider which of these really matter to you.
- Do they have a documented health and safety management system? If so, does it follow a standard model, such as those set by the HSE’s HSG65 guidance or ISO 45001?
- Do they collect accident and incident data beyond the requirements in RIDDOR? If so, what do they do with the data? Do they benchmark their performance? Do they review patterns? Do they investigate individual incidents?
- How do they consult their staff, particularly those who are normally based on a client site? Do they provide time for them to attend consultations, health surveillance, performance reviews or training?
State your terms
Having prequalified organisations by checking they have adequate general health and safety arrangements, you need to check whether contractors can carry out a specific job safely. If you go to tender with a poor idea of what you want such as “I need someone to sort out my asbestos compliance” or “something needs to be done about the roof” it will be difficult to assess the competence of the contractor to do the work.
You need a clear definition of the work to assess the risk, which in turn will determine how much effort you need to put into the checks. A contract to maintain a photocopier is probably low risk; the catering contract is a moderate risk; the contract for statutory inspections of pressure vessels is high risk.
The planning stage should finish with a specification of all aspects of the work the contractor will do, where possible. If you add a task later, the contractor won’t have had the opportunity to risk assess this task, and might not have priced the controls. A dilemma in the invitation to tender is how much detail on safety requirements to include.
“Clients often ask too many general questions in a ‘risk smothering’ exercise,” Paul Reeve says. “If pressed, many admit to doing nothing with most of the information they get from contractors. They would do better to concentrate on project specifics, so they and the contractor can address significant risks associated with the work.”
One danger of listing just some safety requirements is that the contractor might assume these are the only ones they should consider. When presented with detailed documents listing requirements for contractors to make arrangements for work at height, electrical safety and hazardous substances, will they assume they can ignore slip and trip hazards?
Clive Johnson explains that Land Securities has a straightforward way of heading off this problem: “We have spent nearly a year developing detailed hazard logs for each location across the country. As well as providing contractors with the information they need to fully cost their health and safety measures, it provides a useful checklist when ascertaining if they have provided us with an off-the-shelf risk assessment or one tailored to our site.”
If you develop a hazard log system, you must make clear to bidding contractors that the logs are location specific, and it is up to them to consider more general workplace hazards and those related to their work. In other words, tell the contractor testing your fixed wiring that you have asbestos and the loft space is hot, but ask them to identify the hazards of testing fixed wiring, and what precautions they will take to manage your hazards and theirs.
“Clients often ask too many general questions in a ‘risk smothering’ exercise. If pressed, many admit to doing nothing with most of the information they get from contractors. They would do better to concentrate on project specifics, so they and the contractor can address significant risks associated with the work.” Paul Reeve, ECA (2014)
Don't forget health requirements
If health and welfare are sometimes neglected for permanent staff, they are often completely ignored for contractors. Asbestos will commonly be mentioned in refurbishment tenders, and hazardous substances in cleaning tenders, but musculoskeletal disorders, noise and vibration are covered less often, and stress almost never.
While a client cannot ignore an incident when a cleaning contractor falls on the stairs vacuuming or a caterer trips over a step moving a food trolley to a meeting room, if a contractor employee develops dermatitis or asthma, or loses their hearing, who can say which client is responsible?
Contractors might not know what health surveillance is required, or may not have the resources to provide it. Contractor employees may be more mobile in the job market, working for multiple organisations, making an ongoing health record difficult. Facilities managers I spoke to at the time of the original article admitted that neither the companies providing contract labour nor the client organisations recognised health surveillance as their problem. Labour providers think that once on the client site, the contractor is the client’s responsibility. Meanwhile, clients often assume the contracting organisation is responsible.
Client and contractor should make sure before work starts that health and welfare requirements are understood, and that they have agreed who is identifying needs, and who is meeting those needs. Does the client expect the contractor to provide portable toilets, for example, or are they happy for contract staff to use client facilities? If there is a staff canteen, are contractors allowed to use it, and do they need a vending card to do so? For cleaners, who is providing the cleaning substances, who is assessing them, and who is providing health surveillance?
As with safety hazards, clients must specify the health hazards on their site (such as asbestos) and ask contractors to identify those that come with the work (such as noise), and both must agree what surveillance is required and how it will be provided.
At Land Securities, head of health and safety Clive Johnson’s hazard log for contractors (see below) puts health on an equal footing with safety. For work lasting more than six weeks, the developer makes contractors sign up to an occupational health scheme such as Constructing Better Health. “CBH provides industry-wide standards for health and welfare against which the principal contractor can audit the subcontractors,” explains Johnson.
CBH is relevant to construction workers only, but you can ask prospective contractors in any business area about their arrangements for monitoring and managing occupational health.
Update note:
At the time of the original article I referred to a 2003 literature review from the Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL/2003/06) which had found that contractors “were at greater risk of harassment in the workplace, were consulted less and had less access to training or influence over the organisation of work. These workers were also more exposed to strenuous work, repetitive movements and inhalation of dangerous substances.”
The review is no longer on the HSE website. EU-OSHA published a review of Promoting occupational safety and health through the supply chain in 2012, but as with other more recent reviews, they looked at ‘health and safety’ (ie safety) rather than health specifically. Contact me if you’d like a more up-to-date review of the topic.
The Constructing Better Health scheme closed in 2020 with the explanation that “it became increasingly complex and costly to deliver and no longer commercially viable.”
Contractor staff requirements
Clients can also specify the qualifications of contractor staff. There may be technical requirements — for example, an electrician certified under Part P of the Building Regs — and health and safety requirements, such as requiring a project or contract manager to have a NEBOSH certificate.
Clive Johnson explains that Land Securities has very clear ideas about its requirements for individual competence: “We sit down every year with our principal contractors and review the requirements for individual competence. Everyone in the supply chain applies the same competency requirements to all subcontractors.”
Many large clients now insist that anyone working where they might disturb asbestos has annual UK Asbestos Training Association (UKATA) accredited awareness training. Clive Johnson believes this requirement is “sensible and proportionate”.
But is it proportionate? I’ve seen generic asbestos awareness training provided to facilities staff three years in a row. And then discovered they don’t know how to read their own asbestos register, because that wasn’t covered in the training. The ACoP L143 Managing and working with asbestos: Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 (2013) is clear about the requirements for training (see box).
The client's responsibility to provide contractor staff with information about local hazards, such as asbestos
Relevant quotes from L143
258 All training should be given by people who are competent to do so and who have personal practical experience and a theoretical knowledge of all relevant aspects of the work being carried out by the employer.
270 Awareness training is only intended to help employees avoid carrying out work that will disturb asbestos. There is no legal requirement to repeat a formal refresher awareness training course every 12 months. However some form of refresher awareness should be given, as necessary, to help prevent those workers listed in paragraph 233 putting themselves or others at risk in the course of their work.
271 Refresher awareness could be given as e-learning or as part of other health and safety updates, rather than through a formal training course. For example, an employer, manager or supervisor who has attended an awareness course and is competent to do so, as defined in paragraph 258, could deliver an update or safety talk to employees in house.
L143 states competence to train requires ‘practical experience’ and knowledge of ‘relevant’ work carried out by the organisation. In my experience, external UKATA trainers don’t know enough about how work is done in client organisations. A half-day formal training course from an external provider once a year (often combined with a generic legionella awareness course) is not the best way for hands-on staff to learn and retain information. Regular, shorter refreshers during the year, supported by supervision and monitoring will be more effective. In relation to contractors, this means clients might need to put in a little more effort. Rather than accepting a certificate for an off-the-shelf asbestos awareness course, contractors will need awareness training at every site they go to, proportionate to the likelihood of asbestos exposure from the site and the nature of their work. And the client is in the best position to provide that in most cases.
CSCS scheme
In construction, the CSCS (Construction Skills Certification Scheme) cards are standard requirements. They cover different skills at different levels, but all include a construction health and safety test. Other schemes have been developed for other sectors —see the commercially run HSE Passport scheme for an example — but none is widely used. Look at the HSE advice on passport schemes.
The Competent Contractor management service provided by Human Focus maps all qualifications according to the National Core Competency Benchmarks. This avoids any arguments about whether an in-house training course is sufficient; if it has not been mapped in NCCB it does not count. If a contracting organisation believes the training its staff have had is good enough, it can apply to have the course assessed and recorded on NCCB, or prompt its training organisation to do the same. NCCB was founded by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, is supported by the HSE and covers courses from university degrees and diplomas, through rope access, food safety and confined space courses, to entry level awareness courses.
Prequalification schemes may be a useful way to filter out the no-hopers, but they are not enough. Be clear what work you are contracting out and the reasons for doing so. Be consistent in your own hazard identification process so you have clear information to provide to contractors. Don’t waste contractors’ time with general questions where you cannot test the answers. Check that the contractors’ responses have taken account of all the information you supplied, along with anything you would expect to see from them for that type of work.
The process does not stop once the contract is awarded — as we saw at the start, this is only the beginning of the client’s responsibility. In the second article we look at how that responsibility continues during and after the contract period.
Note: If you’d like to read the second article, contact me and I’ll move it up my to-do list!