Phoenix Journal · LEV & Air Quality
Contractors are a constant on any industrial site, and a duty you cannot contract away. Your premises can harm their people and their work can harm yours - which is why the HSE sets out a clear cycle: plan, select, inform, monitor and review.
A contractor is anyone you bring in to work for you who is not your employee, and for most industrial sites they are a constant presence: maintenance engineers, installers, cleaners, welders, duct and extraction crews. They also feature heavily in serious accident statistics, because the moment work is done by people who do not know your site, and your site carries hazards they cannot see, the chances of something being missed rise sharply. Managing that risk is not optional goodwill; it is a legal duty you cannot contract away.
The Health and Safety at Work Act makes you responsible for the health and safety of people who are not your employees but are affected by your work, and for the safety of your premises. The Management Regulations add a duty to co-operate and co-ordinate with other employers sharing a workplace. In plain terms, you and the contractor both have duties, and the harm you are guarding against runs both ways: your site can hurt their people, and their work can hurt yours.
The HSE sets this out as a straightforward cycle: plan the work and the risks, select a contractor who is genuinely competent, make sure they are properly informed and inducted before they start, keep a check on the work while it happens, and review how it went. None of the steps are elaborate, but skipping any of them is where the accidents cluster.
Competence comes first
The first real decision is selection, and the common failure is choosing on price and availability rather than competence. You have to take reasonable steps to satisfy yourself that a contractor can do the job safely, which means asking to see evidence, method statements, training records, past performance, and treating vagueness as a warning sign. Pre-qualification questionnaires and recognised schemes such as those under the Safety Schemes in Procurement umbrella exist to make this quicker for smaller clients who cannot audit everyone themselves.
Once selected, the contractor cannot be left to guess at your site. Before work starts you owe them the relevant hazard information, the site rules, and the emergency arrangements, and they owe you their risk assessments and method statements for the job. An induction should cover the site contact, how to report incidents and unsafe conditions, welfare, and any special hazards, and a simple sign-in system should mean you always know who is on site and where. For higher-hazard or unusual tasks, a permit to work sets out the job, the precautions and the authorisation before anyone begins.
The job is not finished when work starts. Contractors drift from agreed methods like anyone else, so keeping a proportionate check, through walkrounds and a named point of contact, is part of the duty rather than an extra. The depth of all this scales with the risk: a low-hazard visit needs a light touch, while hot work or confined-space entry on a live industrial site needs the full cycle applied properly.
The high-hazard tasks
Some contractor jobs carry enough risk that a general induction is not enough and a specific permit is needed, controlling exactly when and how the work happens. Hot work is the clearest case: bringing a naked flame or sparks onto an industrial site demands the controls, precautions and authorisation set out in how to write a safe system of work for hot work, because the danger created by an outside welder lands on your premises and your people. A permit forces the conversation to happen before the work, pins down who checks what, and gives everyone a shared, written understanding of the precautions, which is precisely what is missing when a contractor accident is later investigated.
Their fume, your air
It is easy to think of contractor risk as physical - falls, machinery, electricity - and forget that contractors bring airborne hazards onto your site too. A contractor spraying two-pack paint on your premises brings exactly the risks described in spray painting safely, booths, fumes and compliance, and that isocyanate mist does not stop at the edge of their work area or care whose payroll they are on. Co-ordinating shared exposures means agreeing in advance how a contractor's dust, fume or mist will be contained, who else is nearby, and whether your extraction and theirs are adequate for the combined load - the kind of question that only gets asked when the client treats air quality as part of managing contractors, not an afterthought.
Questions
Both. The Health and Safety at Work Act makes you responsible for people affected by your work and for your premises, while the contractor is responsible for how they carry out the work. The Management Regulations require you to co-operate and co-ordinate, so the duties are shared.
Take reasonable steps to check before you engage them: ask for method statements, training records and past performance, and treat vagueness as a warning. Pre-qualification questionnaires and recognised procurement schemes make this quicker, especially for smaller clients.
For higher-hazard or unusual tasks such as hot work or confined-space entry. A permit sets out the job, the precautions and the authorisation in writing before work starts, so everyone shares the same understanding of the controls - the thing usually missing when a contractor accident is investigated.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Shared exposures need extraction that can cope. Phoenix examines and tests LEV to COSHH Regulation 9 and reports on real capture at source. UK-wide.