Institute of Work Health and Safety / Conditions

Contractors, and the duty that does not transfer

You can outsource the work. The obligation is shared, not moved.

Engaging a contractor moves the task to somebody else's workforce and does not move the responsibility for the conditions in which it is performed. In most modern frameworks, more than one party can hold a duty at the same time in respect of the same work, and each must do what is reasonable within their influence. That is a deliberately awkward arrangement because the alternative allows harm to fall into a gap between organisations.

In practice the failures cluster at the interfaces. The contractor's method assumes the site is isolated; the site assumes the contractor brings isolation. One party's induction covers site hazards, the other's covers task hazards, and the interaction between them is nobody's. A subcontractor arrives who was not in any of the conversations.

The controls are unexciting and effective: a genuine pre-start where both parties describe the work aloud rather than exchanging documents, a named person on each side, and explicit agreement about who controls what. Most importantly, a shared understanding of who can stop the job, and confidence on both sides that stopping it will be supported.

The documentary side matters too, but a folder of received method statements is evidence of a transaction rather than of a conversation, and it is the conversation that changes what happens on the day.

The other interface failure worth naming is temporal rather than organisational. Work handed over between shifts, or between a contractor finishing and a crew arriving, loses whatever was known and not written: the isolation that is still in place, the component left disassembled, the reason a guard is off. Handover is where a well-controlled task becomes an uncontrolled one, and it is almost never treated as a hazard in its own right despite being implicated in a great many incidents.