Managing contractors safely on your site
Nobody plans to have a serious accident involving a contractor. What happens is a job gets booked at short notice, somebody lets them in, and nobody’s entirely sure whose responsibility they were until afterwards.
So let’s walk it through the way it actually happens, from the phone call to the moment they drive off. The gaps are almost always in the joins.
Before you book them
You’ve got a job that needs doing. Maybe the extraction’s playing up, maybe you need someone on the roof.
The question to ask at this point isn’t “can they do it?” It’s “can they do it safely, here, on my site?” Those aren’t the same question. Ask for their method statement and risk assessment, proof of insurance, and whatever training or tickets the job calls for.
Keep it in proportion, mind. Changing a light fitting isn’t working at height on a roof, and your checks should match the risk in front of you rather than the size of your folder. I’ve seen firms put a plumber through a fortnight of paperwork and then let a roofer on with a handshake, because the plumber came through procurement and the roofer was a mate of the maintenance lad.
The morning they turn up
This is where most of it goes wrong, and it goes wrong for a daft reason. Everyone’s busy.
Somebody needs to walk them round. Not hand them a laminated sheet, walk them round. Where the fire exits are, where the traffic routes run, what’s running that they need to keep clear of, who to find if something changes. Two minutes of pointing beats two pages of induction.
And they need to tell you things as well. What are they bringing on site? Anything hot, anything that’ll make dust, anything that’ll block a route or an exit? A contractor cutting into a wall with an angle grinder next to your only fire door is a problem you want to know about at eight in the morning, not at half past three.
While they’re on
The bit firms skip. You’ve done the checks, done the induction, and now everyone gets on with their day.
The trouble is a job rarely stays the way it was described. They find something unexpected behind the panel. The part doesn’t fit. They need to come back tomorrow with different kit. Every one of those changes the risk, and none of them will reach you unless somebody’s looking.
You don’t need to stand over them. You need one named person who knows they’re on site and walks past every so often. That’s it. And your own people need to know the score too, because a contractor working in a live area is a risk to your team as much as to themselves.
When they say they’ve finished
“Finished” means different things to different trades. I’ve walked onto sites the morning after a contractor left and found a guard off a machine, a panel unscrewed, and a cable taped across a walkway. Nobody did that maliciously. They finished at five, they were coming back Monday, and they left it how they’d need it.
So go and look before they drive off. Is the guard back on? Is the isolation removed? Is the area clear? If they’re coming back, what state is it being left in overnight, and who else is going to walk through there in the meantime?
The bit that makes all of it easier
Do this once properly and write down what you did, and you’ve got a way of working you can use every time. That’s the bit firms resist. I hear “we’ve got too many different jobs and too many different contractors to standardise it” fairly often, and I don’t buy it.
Having a lot of processes isn’t a reason not to have a standard way of handling them. It’s the reason you need one. If every contractor visit is improvised, then how safe it goes depends on who happened to be about that morning, and that’s not a system, that’s luck.
If you want to sanity-check how your site handles this, the free self-assessment checklists at /documents will walk you through it. And if you’d rather just talk it over, book a stress-free chat.