Working with contractors safely in a hospitality setting

A bloke turned up at Harbourside one Tuesday morning to swap an extractor motor. Friendly, in a hurry, knew his stuff. He grabbed a stepladder from the cellar (our stepladder, not his), climbed it without anyone checking it, and the foot gave way. He came down sideways into the glass partition by the pass and put a hand straight through it. He was, miraculously, fine. A cut, some bruising, a story for the pub.

The paperwork that followed was not fine. Our insurer wanted his RAMS. The landlord wanted to know if we had a permit for the work. The HSE didn't end up involved because nobody went to hospital, but if he had hit the glass differently, they would have. And none of the documents anyone asked for existed, because I had treated him like a mate doing me a favour rather than a contractor on my premises.

That morning is why I now have rules about contractors. This guide is what I wish someone had handed me in 2010.

Why this matters

When a contractor is on your premises, you are not off the hook just because they are not your employee. Under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, the occupier of a premises has duties to anyone on site, including the contractor themselves and any staff or customers nearby. The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 push further duties onto you the moment the work counts as construction, which includes a surprising amount of refurb, plumbing, and electrical work in a café.

The practical version: if a contractor falls through your skylight, your insurer is going to ask what you checked before you let them up there. If they leave a fryer wired incorrectly and it causes a fire at 3am, your loss assessor will want to see the competence checks. And if an EHO turns up the day after a pest control treatment and you cannot produce the COSHH sheets for what was sprayed, you have a problem.

Most operators I know are excellent at managing their own team. The contractor side is where it falls apart, because contractors feel like they sit outside the business. They don't. The moment they cross your threshold, they are your problem.

The three rules, every time

I do not let anyone start work in one of my spaces without three things on file. They are not optional and they are not negotiable, even for the gas engineer I have used for ten years.

• Insurance certificate, seen and dated. Public liability of at least £5m, employer's liability if they have staff, and the certificate must be in date on the day the work happens. A copy from last March is not enough. Take a photo, save it, write the date you saw it.
• Risk assessment for the specific work, seen and dated. Not a generic "we work safely" PDF. A document that says what they are doing in your premises, what could go wrong, and how they have controlled it. If they are working at height, it should say so. If they are using chemicals, the COSHH sheets should be attached.
• Induction, done before tools come out. Five minutes. Where the fire exits are, where the alarm panel is, where to wash hands, what not to touch (the prep surfaces, the pass, the till), who their point of contact is, and what to do if something goes wrong.

That is it. Three things. Ten minutes of admin. If a contractor refuses any of the three, that is your answer about whether to use them.

Different contractors, different competence regimes

The mistake I made for years was treating "contractor" as one category. It is not. Each trade has its own competence framework and you need to know what good looks like.

HVAC and refrigeration

Anyone working on systems with refrigerant gas needs F-Gas certification (the company holds a company certificate, the engineer holds a personal one). Ask to see both. For ventilation cleaning, the recognised standard is TR/19, published by BESA. A proper canopy and ductwork clean should come with a TR/19 report showing pre and post grease deposit measurements. If your insurer ever asks about deep clean compliance, that report is what they want.

Gas

Gas Safe registered, full stop. Check the engineer's card and check the categories on the back. Commercial catering gas is a different ticket to domestic. Plenty of perfectly good domestic gas engineers are not signed off for commercial catering, and they should not be touching your six burner.

Electrical

NICEIC or NAPIT registered for the company, and they should be issuing certificates (a Minor Works or an EIC) for anything they do. No certificate, no payment. Your five yearly EICR is the document your insurer will ask for when you renew.

Pest control

BPCA or NPTA membership for the technician. After every visit you should get a report sheet that goes in your pest folder. If they treat anywhere near food, the COSHH sheet for the product used has to be on site. EHOs love asking to see this and most operators cannot produce it.

Builders, decorators, general trades

CSCS card as a baseline. For any structural work, you may be the "client" under CDM 2015, which carries duties about appointing competent people and making sure welfare facilities are provided. Worth a conversation with your landlord before the job starts.

Kitchen deep clean

This one is often the worst documented. You want a company that follows TR/19, provides before and after photos, certificates of clean for the canopy and ductwork, and a clear scope of what was and was not done. "Deep clean" with no paperwork is just a wipe down.

What your insurance and your lease both ask of you

Here is the bit most operators do not realise. Your insurance policy and your lease are both quietly assuming you are doing contractor management properly, and if you are not, you will find out at the worst possible moment.

Your insurer's policy schedule will almost always have a contractors condition tucked away in it. It typically requires that you obtain evidence of public liability cover before allowing work to commence, that hot works (anything involving flame, grinding, or heat) are subject to a hot works permit, and that any work outside normal trading hours is notified in advance. Break the condition, claim refused. I have seen it happen to a friend whose kitchen fire was traced to a contractor's angle grinder. Insurer pointed at the hot works clause. Friend pointed at the contractor. Contractor pointed at his £1m policy excess. Nobody won.

Your lease will usually have a clause requiring landlord's consent for alterations and often for any work touching the structure, services, or shopfront. It will frequently require you to use approved contractors for the gas, electrical, and HVAC systems, and to provide certificates afterwards. Operators get caught out when they refit a back bar without telling the landlord, then try to assign the lease three years later and the landlord refuses because the alterations were never consented.

The short version: read both documents, write down what they require, and build it into your contractor process. Most of it overlaps with the three rules above anyway.

Permits to work, and when you actually need one

A permit to work is a written document that authorises specific work, by a specific person, in a specific place, for a specific time, with named controls in place. It sounds like overkill for a café. It isn't, for two categories of work.

Hot works is the big one. Anything involving flame, hot air guns, grinding, or welding. Your insurer almost certainly requires a hot works permit and a one hour fire watch after the work finishes. We had a fire alarm go off at Welsh Back two hours after a contractor had been welding a bracket. Nothing came of it, but a smouldering offcut had landed in a bin liner and would happily have started a fire overnight. The fire watch is not theatre.

The other category is work in confined spaces, on the roof, or in areas with live services. Anywhere a problem could become a fatality. A permit forces a conversation about isolation, ventilation, and rescue before anyone starts.

A permit is a sheet of A4. Date, location, work to be done, hazards, controls, who is doing it, who authorises it, sign off when complete. It takes five minutes and it is the difference between "we let him on site" and "we managed the work".

Common mistakes

• Treating regulars like family: The gas engineer who has been coming for a decade still needs a current certificate on file. Your insurer does not care how nice he is.
• Accepting a generic risk assessment: A PDF that mentions "working at height" with no reference to your specific roof, your specific ladder, or your specific shop floor is not a risk assessment. It is a template.
• Skipping the induction because they "know the building": Fire exits get blocked, alarm panels get moved, hand wash stations change. A 90 second walk round costs nothing.
• No hot works permit for short jobs: "He's only welding for ten minutes" is exactly when fires start, because no one set a fire watch.
• Not telling the landlord: Small jobs add up. By the time you sell or assign, the cumulative unconsented work is a real problem.
• Paying before the certificate arrives: The EIC, the gas safety record, the TR/19 report. No paperwork, no payment. It is the only stick you have.