Page 1350 - Xmo Strata - Bulletin Archive

Health, Safety & Environmental Bulletin No 500

28 January 2016

Client Due Diligence

As a client, when you place an order on a supplier or subcontractor, you are then vicariously liable for
their actions on your site. Your employees, managers and directors liberty could be at risk if you
haven’t checked out their competence, or as specified in the Management of Health & Safety at Work
Act etc. 1974, their knowledge, experience, practical ability and training.

Given that you don’t necessarily know all the suppliers control procedures, you are placing a huge
amount of trust in them to provide suitable and sufficient information, instruction, training and
supervision of their employees, which you are legally responsible for.

So, does this always happen?

We all employ people that have a bad day, don’t understand exactly what is required or occasionally
employ someone that may cut corners when under pressure to achieve a deadline or SLA, thinking they
are doing the client a favour – until it goes wrong!

Even with the robust control procedures that we have developed at Xmo Strata, we make mistakes.

Unlike some other businesses, we have shared our mistakes via discussion and Best Practice safety
bulletins, investigated them, tried to learn from them and as a result, believe we have a much stronger
business that protects our clients, managers, directors and staff from potential safety incidents and
prosecution.

We have spent most of the last year working on further strengthening our XmoMan job planning
module.

Stage 1 - we employed an external safety expert to review and further improve our supplier
accreditation process, especially with specialist contractors like pest control, groundworks and
scaffolding where are responsible for their work, but are not experts and could be caught out.

Stage 2 - we worked hard on analysing our HSSE reporting data (as we always have) to identify trends
and training needs in line with our findings.

Stage 3 - we built a robust system to make it impossible for anyone to schedule work to an employee or
subcontractor that is not accredited as competent for the task specified.

As part of this procedure, we have developed an on-line training hub, with more than 20 interactive
training courses designed by Xmo Strata for Xmo Strata employees that we will share more about in
bulletin 505.