If contractors work on your site, it is natural to wonder where your responsibility ends and theirs begins. The short answer is that you share responsibility for their health and safety, including making sure they are competent for the work you have asked them to do. In practice, this is rather straightforward, once you have a clear process in place, and it gives you real confidence that everyone on site is set up to do their job well.
At CheckSafe, we help New Zealand businesses manage contractor compliance alongside their own team, all in one place. This guide explains your PCBU obligations in plain terms and shows how to manage contractor competency. It is general information rather than legal advice, so for specific situations it is worth checking with a qualified health and safety professional.
The Short Answer: Yes, and Here Is Why
Yes, you are responsible for your contractors' competency, and the reassuring part is that you are not carrying that responsibility alone. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA), a person conducting a business or undertaking, known as a PCBU, holds duties for the health and safety of the people affected by its work. When you bring contractors onto your site, those duties overlap with theirs.
This is known as having overlapping duties. WorkSafe New Zealand explains that PCBUs in a contracting chain must, so far as is reasonably practicable, consult, cooperate and coordinate with each other to keep everyone safe. You can read the detail in WorkSafe's guidance on PCBUs working together when contracting. The practical takeaway is clear: making sure a contractor is competent for the work is part of your job, not only theirs.
Understanding Your PCBU Obligations
Your PCBU obligations are about influence and control rather than red tape. You are expected to manage health and safety to the extent that you can influence and control the work being done. For contractor competency, that usually means knowing the work is being carried out by people who are trained and verified to do it safely.
A few principles make these obligations easy to understand:
You cannot contract out of your health and safety duties or hand the risk to someone else
You are responsible to the workers you influence and direct, not only those you directly employ
You are not expected to duplicate another PCBU's effort, simply to coordinate so nothing falls through the gap
You should agree who is best placed to manage each risk, then check that the arrangement is working
WorkSafe's position on overlapping duties sets out these expectations and how PCBUs are meant to share responsibility sensibly, without doubling up on each other's work.
Why Contractors Count as Your Workers
One point often surprises business owners: under HSWA, contractors, their subcontractors and their employees who carry out work for you are treated as your workers for health and safety purposes. That does not change their employment status, though it does mean their safety sits within your duty of care while they are doing work you have engaged them for.
Seen positively, this is a good thing. It encourages everyone on site to work to the same standard, which makes coordination easier and the whole operation safer. Knowing that a contractor's training is current and verified gives you the same confidence in them as you already have in your own team.
How to Manage Contractor Competency Without the Headaches
Meeting your competency duty does not need to be complicated. A clear, repeatable process is all it takes, and most of it can be set up once and reused for every contractor who comes on board. The essentials are:
Define the competencies, qualifications and verifications each task requires before work begins
Collect and record evidence of contractor training and certifications up front
Confirm that competencies are current, not simply held at some point in the past
Use verification of competency to check that skills are applied safely in practice
Keep contractor records in the same place as your own team, so nothing is missed
Agree clearly who is managing which risk, and review it as the work progresses
Doing this once, in a system that stores everything together, turns contractor compliance from a recurring scramble into a quick, confident check.
Making Contractor Compliance Part of Your Everyday Process
The businesses that find this easiest are the ones that build contractor checks into their normal onboarding, rather than treating each engagement as a one-off. When a contractor's competencies are recorded and tracked the same way your employees are, staying compliant becomes part of the routine instead of a separate task.
Setting a consistent standard helps everyone know what is expected. Industry resources such as the CHASNZ health and safety competency frameworks give you a recognised reference point for the competencies you ask contractors to meet, so your expectations are clear and fair from the start.
With a shared standard and a single record, you can welcome new contractors quickly, assign work with confidence, and keep your site running smoothly.
How CheckSafe Helps You Manage Contractor Compliance
CheckSafe is a competency management system that lets you manage contractors and subcontractors alongside your own workforce, all from one secure, cloud-based platform. You get a single, real-time view of who is competent, current and ready to work, whoever they happen to work for.
With CheckSafe you can:
Store contractor qualifications, certifications and training records in one place
Define the competencies required for each task or site
Manage verification of competency with preloaded or custom assessments
Receive automatic reminders before contractor certifications expire
Keep a single real-time view of compliance across your own team and your contractors
Generate compliance and audit reports whenever you need them
The result is a calm, organised approach to contractor compliance that protects your people and gives you confidence in every engagement. Learn more on our contractor compliance management software page or see how it works alongside our subcontractor compliance software.
Ready to Take the Guesswork Out of Contractor Compliance?
Knowing you are responsible is the first step, and putting a simple system around it is what makes contractor compliance easy to live with. CheckSafe gives you that system, so every person on site is set up to work safely.
Want a simple system to manage it? Explore your options.
Not sure what is required? We can walk you through it.
CheckSafe. Your partner for competency, compliance and safer workplaces.
