CDM 2015 no longer asks whether a contractor is "competent". Regulation 8 asks instead for the skills, knowledge and experience, and the organisational capability, necessary to fulfil the role in a manner that secures the health and safety of any person affected by the project, and it requires whoever makes the appointment to take reasonable steps to satisfy themselves of that before appointing. A card, a certificate or a scheme membership is evidence towards the judgement, not the judgement itself. Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 sits behind it: a principal contractor who puts an incapable subcontractor on a site is answering under its own duty to the people its undertaking affects.
Here is what the check looks like from the side of the desk that makes the appointment.
Reasonable steps are proportionate steps
The regulation says reasonable, and reasonable means proportionate to the risk of the work. A one-day decorator does not need a forty-page questionnaire; the demolition contractor, the roofer and the electrician taking down a live board do. One mistake is the buyer who asks every subcontractor for everything and reads none of it; the other is the order placed on price, with the questions asked afterwards.
The four things worth checking
- Experience of comparable work. Not years trading but projects of this type, scale and setting, with a named person who will take a phone call. Take the reference.
- A sample of their real paperwork. Ask for a recent RAMS for similar work and judge whether it was written for that site or has a company name changed at the top. The trade that sends a generic document at tender will send one on the job.
- The people and the supervision. Who supervises, what they hold, and whether a supervisor is on site whenever work is in progress. Cards are checked against the person at induction.
- Organisational capability. Enough people, plant and management for this package at this programme, with the insurance, a health and safety policy signed by a director, and the enforcement history of the last five years answered honestly.
An SSIP certificate is evidence towards the health and safety management part of that at stage one, once the buyer has verified it with the scheme, and the point of the schemes is that a subcontractor is not made to answer the same questions for every buyer. It does not answer the questions about this work, these people and this programme. Those are stage two, and they are the buyer's to ask.
What the record has to show
The check has to be evidenced or it did not happen. The trail is short: the questionnaire with the subcontractor's answers and the buyer's scores, the reg 8 assessment that records the judgement and who made it, the approved list the subcontractor went on to, and the register that chases the insurance and the accreditation before they lapse. Then, at completion, a performance review scored by the site manager who ran the package, because the next assessment relies on what was delivered, not on what was promised.
The two traps
The first is the pass mark nobody set. A scoring column with no line under it is decoration: decide the mark for the trade and the risk, write it on the form, and treat a zero on the policy, the sample RAMS or any insurance line as a fail whatever the total. The second is the approved list nobody comes off. A subcontractor stays approved only while its questionnaire is in date and its certificates are current: a lapsed questionnaire drops it to conditional, a lapsed certificate suspends it.
What a template does not do
A questionnaire gives the buyer the questions, the scoring column and the decision box, and prints the duty the check answers. It does not make the judgement. A competent person in the buyer's office does that, on evidence actually seen, and no document makes anyone compliant. Why we will never call a document "compliant".
Documents for this work
- The subcontractor management bundle — all six office documents
- Subcontractor Pre-Qualification Questionnaire
- Approved Subcontractor Register
- Subcontractor Insurance and Accreditation Expiry Register
- Health and Safety Conditions of Subcontract
- Subcontractor Performance Review and Scoring
- Subcontractor Start-Up Pack Issue Record
- Skills, Knowledge and Experience Assessment — the reg 8 judgement itself, in the CDM 2015 set
- Contractor Insurance and Accreditation Schedule — the site manager's check at pre-start, in the site forms