How to Manage Contractor Compliance

When you engage subcontractors, their compliance becomes your problem. Under health-and-safety law, businesses share a duty to ensure work is carried out safely — which means you need to know every contractor on your site is competent, inducted and insured.

Start with prequalification

Before a contractor sets foot on site, prequalify them. Collect and verify the essentials: business details, relevant licences and trade qualifications, a current public liability and (where relevant) professional indemnity insurance certificate, and evidence of their own health-and-safety system. Keep these on file with expiry dates so you can see at a glance who is approved.

Run a site or company induction

Every contractor should complete an induction covering your site rules, hazards, emergency procedures and reporting expectations. Record who was inducted and when, and set a renewal period so inductions do not silently expire.

Require SWMS for high-risk work

For higher-risk activities, require a Safe Work Method Statement (SWMS) or job safety analysis that identifies the hazards, the controls and the PPE required, signed by the workers doing the task. This is both good practice and, in Australia, a legal requirement for high-risk construction work.

Track insurance and certification expiry

Insurance lapses and expired tickets are the most common compliance gaps. The fix is simple: record every certificate and policy with its expiry date and get an automatic reminder well before it lapses, so renewals are chased in advance rather than discovered during an audit.

Keep an audit-ready record

If a regulator or principal contractor asks, you should be able to produce, in minutes, a complete record of each contractor: their prequalification, induction, insurance, SWMS and any incidents. A central register — rather than folders and email threads — turns a stressful audit into a non-event.

Monitor, do not set and forget

Compliance is ongoing. Review approved contractors periodically, capture any incidents or non-conformances against them, and track corrective actions through to close-out so issues are genuinely resolved, not just noted.