Managing contractors you do not employ

Almost everything that happens to a building is done by someone the manager does not employ. The lift engineer, the fire alarm contractor, the roofer, the cladding remediation team, the cleaner who props a fire door to drag a hose through — all of them affect the safety of the building, and none of them are on the manager's payroll. Managing that work is one of the least visible and most consequential parts of the job.

The difficulty is structural. You are accountable for the building's condition and compliance, but the people changing its condition answer to their own employers, their own schedules and their own commercial pressures. Closing that gap is not about supervising every visit. It is about building a system that makes contractor work visible, competent and recorded.

The risk lives in the gaps

Things go wrong with external contractors at the seams: where one trade's work undoes another's, where nobody checks that a competent person did the work, where a job is marked complete without evidence, and where an alteration is made that nobody feeds back into the building record. A fire-stopping breach left after a cabling job is the classic example — a small, invisible failure introduced by work that was, in every other respect, done correctly.

The compartmentation, the protected routes and the fire-stopping that a fire risk assessment relies on can all be quietly compromised by routine contractor activity. That is why the FRA, required under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and clarified by the Fire Safety Act 2021 to cover structure, external walls and flat entrance doors (gov.uk), is only as current as the building it describes. Every contractor visit is a chance for the building and its assessment to drift apart.

Competence, before the work starts

The first control is making sure the right people are doing the work. For an Accountable Person under the Building Safety Act 2022, demonstrating that work was carried out by competent parties is part of holding a credible safety case (RICS). For everyone else, it is simply good practice that prevents the most predictable failures.

A workable approach is a standing check before any contractor is engaged:

• Confirmation of competence appropriate to the task — accreditation, certification or a demonstrable track record.
• Evidence of insurance current at the time of the work.
• A method statement and risk assessment for anything beyond the routine.
• A named, contactable individual responsible for the job.

This does not need to be heavy. It needs to be consistent, so that the answer to "who did this and were they competent" is never a shrug.

Permits for the work that can hurt the building

Some work carries enough risk that it should not happen on an informal basis. Hot works, work that breaches a compartment line, work that takes a fire system offline, work at height over occupied areas — these warrant a permit that records what is being done, when, what protections are in place, and who has authorised it.

A permit is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It forces a short conversation before the work starts about what could go wrong, and it leaves a record that the conversation happened. Where a contractor is taking a life-safety system out of service, the permit is also the mechanism that ensures it is put back, tested and signed off rather than quietly left isolated. The discipline of contractor permits and keeping work accountable is worth more than its modest administrative cost.

The record the contractor leaves behind

A contractor visit that leaves no trace might as well not have produced compliance at all. The service was done, but if there is no certificate, no photograph and no entry in the log, the building cannot prove it. When an assessor, an insurer or a regulator asks for evidence, "it was definitely done" is not an answer.

The records to capture are mundane and non-negotiable: the certificate or test result, the date, the engineer, the outcome, and a photograph where the work is concealed or hard to verify later. For statutory servicing this is the difference between compliant and merely serviced. LOLER requires a thorough examination of passenger-lifting equipment every six months and load-only lifting every twelve, or to a written scheme (HSE) — and the value of that examination, for the manager, is the report it produces, not just the visit.

Feeding alterations back into the building record

The control that gets forgotten is the loop back to the building's own information. When a contractor alters the building — moves a wall, forms an opening, re-routes a service, changes an asset — that change has to find its way into the plans and the asset register, or the record drifts from reality.

This is the golden thread in practice. The Building Safety Act 2022 frames it as an accurate, up-to-date digital record held through occupation (ICE), and contractor work is the single biggest source of the changes that keep it from being accurate. A building whose plans and asset register are updated as part of closing out a job stays current. One where contractor changes are never fed back becomes a building nobody fully understands.

Making it a routine, not a scramble

The throughline is that contractor management works when it is routine. A standing competence check, a permit for the work that warrants one, an evidence requirement for every job, and a habit of feeding alterations back into the record — none of these is difficult on its own. The difficulty is doing them consistently, across many contractors and many small jobs, without the system depending on one person's memory.

In SAMRISK, contractor activity ties back to the building it touches — permits, the compliance calendar that schedules the servicing, the certificates the work produces and the plans it changes — so the work of people you do not employ still leaves a trail you control. The contractors will always outnumber the people on your payroll. The point is to make sure their work is visible, competent and recorded, every time.