Contractor Duties And Competence Requirements

As a contractor, you are obligated to:

• Ensure that building work does not begin until you are confident the client fully understands their legal responsibilities.
• Take all necessary steps to ensure that the building work, whether performed by your team or subcontractors, is planned, managed, and monitored appropriately.
• Collaborate effectively with the client, designers, and other contractors (including the principal designer and principal contractor) to ensure compliance with all relevant regulations.
• Guarantee that all work completed under your supervision meets legal and safety standards.
• Provide adequate supervision, instructions, and information to all workers under your responsibility.
• Supply sufficient information about your work to help the client, other contractors, and designers fulfill their compliance obligations.
• Offer guidance to the principal contractor or client when asked, particularly regarding whether any work falls under higher-risk building work categories.

If your responsibilities involve only part of the project, you should assess how your work interacts with other ongoing tasks. You must notify the principal contractor if you have concerns about:

• Your work affecting the compliance of other building activities.
• Other activities impacting the compliance of your own work.

When hiring additional contractors, you are responsible for ensuring they have the necessary competence to perform the work to required standards.

Competence Requirements

The duties and responsibilities of individuals, to be a competent contractor

An individual, when working on site as a contractor, must be able to demonstrate that they are competent to carry out their duties and undertake the work. They must have the necessary skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours to do the work, or they should not be doing it.

Individuals must be able to:

• ensure their work complies with all relevant requirements
• co-operate with others working on the project
• ask for assistance from others when necessary
• refuse to carry out work that is beyond their competence
• refuse to carry out non-compliant work

The duties and responsibilities of organisations, to be a competent contractor

Organisations must be able to demonstrate that they are competent and that they have the organisational capability to carry out their duties and undertake the work. This means that they must have policies, procedures, systems and resources in place to make sure that those individuals employed by the organisation, comply with all relevant regulations.

An organisation should put procedures and policies in place to:

• actively monitor and supervise their people
• provide sufficient time and resources to do the job

Trainees And Competence

A trainee without the necessary competence cannot carry out design work or building work unsupervised. Whoever appoints the trainee must ensure that the trainee has adequate supervision to carry out the work.

Being Honest About Competence

Individuals and organisations must be honest and truthful regarding their competence and capabilities to do work. They should notify whoever appointed them whenever:

• they are no longer competent, or no longer have the organisational capability to carry out their duties
• they have been issued with a serious sanction if they are working on a project that involves higher-risk building work