Contractor Management
Updated: Dec 20, 2021
Contractor Management
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Advice when Contracting
The majority of businesses in New Zealand at some point engage contractors. When contractors are engaged health and safety obligations can overlap. Whether it is engaging a cleaner for the office or hiring subcontractors to assist with a construction project - health and safety duties become shared.
All PCBUs involved have duties under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA).
This Safety talk will illustrate different contractual relationships between parties, and provide examples of ways health and safety is built into contract management.
Key points are:
Consult, Co-operate and Co-ordinate with other PCBUs when working in a shared workplace or as part of a contracting chain.
You can’t contract out of health and safety duties
You should always build health and safety into contract management.
What you need to know
If you share duties with other PCBUs you must consult, co-operate with and
co-ordinate activities with all other PCBUs you share duties with, so far as is
reasonably practicable.
Where duties are shared, all PCBUs have a responsibility to meet those duties,
to the extent that they have the ability to influence or control the matter.
Self - Employed?
If a self-employed person is working for another PCBU, they both share duties as a PCBU.
If the self-employed person decides how their own work is done and creates and controls risks, they are considered to have the ability to influence or control the matter.
If the self employed person is working for another PCBU, and the PCBU decides what they do, and how and when they do it, then that PCBU is considered to have the ability to influence or control the matter.
Do you share H&S Duties?
PCBU’s that work together, either in a shared workplace or in a contracting chain,
will often share health and safety duties in relation to the same matter.
Shared Workplace
This is where several different contractors / businesses are working in the same place
(e.g. Construction Site, Event, Shopping Centre or Port) They will not usually share
contractual relationships with each other. More than one contractor may control or