What 500,000 hours on site actually tells you about a subcontractor

Every subcontractor you pre-qualify has a CHAS certificate and almost every one has completed the Constructionline questionnaire.

Most will have a health and safety policy that runs to several pages, a named safety officer and a toolbox talk register that looks entirely in order.

Procurement teams process this information and issue pass or fail decisions – and the process feels rigorous because it is extensive. The problem is that it does not necessarily tell you very much.

Safety documentation is a record of intention – what a business says it will do, evidenced against a framework designed to catch the companies that will not even commit to saying it. It is a useful baseline and pre-qualification processes exist for good reason.

But documentation compliance and safety culture are different things – and the difference matters most on the jobs where things go wrong.

Safety culture is what happens when the pressure is on, when the programme is behind, when a short-cut is available and when nobody senior is watching.

A subcontractor with genuine safety culture makes the same decision in those circumstances as they do on a calm day with a client visiting. A subcontractor with good safety documentation makes whatever decision the programme demands and writes it up afterwards.

The question, then, is how you tell them apart at tender stage – before anything has gone wrong.

The most useful indicators are not in the documentation, they are in the track record. How many hours has this company worked on site – and across how many projects? What is their RIDDOR record?

How long have their operatives been with them (because experienced, stable teams have fewer accidents than revolving-door labour pools)? What does their approach to near-miss reporting look like – and does the answer suggest a culture of learning or a culture of concealment?

These are harder questions to ask and harder to evidence – but they are more predictive of what will actually happen on your site than any questionnaire.

At HKL, we have worked approaching 500,000 hours on site across both divisions without a single RIDDOR-reportable incident.

We do not mention that figure to claim perfection – construction is inherently hazardous and no company should be complacent. We mention it because we believe it is the most honest answer we can give to the question that actually matters: what happens on our sites when nobody is checking?

The answer, in our case, is the same thing that happens when they are.