Hi all,

After many years of working for constrution companies with 100% PAYE staff, i am now at one where everyone (bar the office staff) are self employed and am struggling to get my head around things. The self employed guys, from what i can gather, seem fall into two distinct categories:

Type 1) Sole traders who are directly engaged by the company as individuals. Many of these have worked almost exclusively for the firm for many years and are essentially full members of staff. They get paid at the end of each week, are on the company training matrix, have most of their training paid for etc

Type 2) Sole traders who are engaged through one of the above sole traders. The "type 1" sole trader will be paid a lump of cash each week and will then pay the guys working "for" him. In many cases it seems that the company doesn't know exactly who these guys are and tends to put the trust in the person "employing" them.

At the moment i'm struggling to get my head around where the responsibility lies for things such as:

-RAMS

-Provision of PPE (as well as face fitting to RPE)

-Training in general (including PPE)

Does anyone else work with a similar setup and if so, how do you manage it?

Thanks in advance

Stern

Ok here goes,

All the Guys that you have on site that work for you need to be covered under your commitment to H&S in the contract you have with the Pricipal Contractor.

What this means is that effectively all the self employed, sole traders will be seen as employees of yours and representing your company on site.

Therefore you need to ensure that you treat them as any employees on a site and make sure that they are inducted, Trained and protected as say a full time employee.

You would be responsible for issuing PPE, Writing of RAMS and H&S policys and things like Toolbox talks, Face fit training etc..

Ideally you would select someone to act as your Site Manager, someone with a Practical as well as knowledgable experiance that can run the site jobs for your company.

I'm a little concerned that some of the workers will also bring other workers, and you'll be responsible for these workers who you havn't met!. I would ask the guys to let you have the contact dedails and you contact the person to see if they are suitable and have the experience and qualification to be on the site and do the Job.

I was working on a site where someone said that they would bring their mate in to help with Steel Errecting etc, turns out the Guy was hopeless his last job of 23 years was a butcher!

Remember you run the Company They work for you!

It's not that unsual for staff to be self-employed or contingent staff provided by an agency in construction and especially in the railway industry - glad I'm out of it.

As for the RAMS, it is best if all those who are in effect 'employees' from a h&s perspective work to the company's procedures and RAMS. Pointless them all having a different set of RAMS.

TBH, I am surprised you are asking these questions - what happened before you arrived?

For Construction Workers who are Self Employed they need to register under the CIS scheme with the Tax office.  Its not uncommon for companies to have all self employed workers and lay them off inbetween jobs

Originally Posted by: RayRapp

It's not that unsual for staff to be self-employed or contingent staff provided by an agency in construction and especially in the railway industry - glad I'm out of it.

As for the RAMS, it is best if all those who are in effect 'employees' from a h&s perspective work to the company's procedures and RAMS. Pointless them all having a different set of RAMS.

TBH, I am surprised you are asking these questions - what happened before you arrived?

Hi RayRapp,

That is kind of where my confusion lies. My understanding was always that the employer writes the RAMS. I've been lucky in that during my 8-9 years of H&S, the line has always been very clear. Now though, i'm struggling to understand who's who! Here's the full range of people i've found so far

1) PAYE staff 

2) Sole traders (individuals)

3) Sole traders (part of a gang paid via the "head" of the gang who is also a sole trader)

4) Sole traders (part of a gang paid via the "head" of the gang who has registered himself as a Ltd company)

Number 1 is obvious. Number 2 is also fairly black and white. It's 3 and 4 where i'm going round in circles!

Firesafety101,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I did write a reply with your post as a quote but for some reason it has vanished!

So far as the Ltd company thing goes, my initial reaction when i heard he was Ltd was to put them through a full pre-qualification questionnaire and then manage them as i would any other subcontractor firm back in my previous employment. However, back in the day i dealt with large contractrors and, although he's technically a Ltd, he's not REALLY a company in that respect, he's just a guy who's registered himself as a Ltd company for whatever reason and has a few guys who work with him. 

The general consensus seems to be that a gang of sole traders, headed up by a soletrader become our responsibility when they work for us (in terms of RAMS, PPE etc) and that there's little or no difference between them and ful time PAYE staff. Does that change the instance the main guy in the gang registers himself as a Ltd company?

With all due respect this is just a 'control test' example as the limited co / sole trader etc. areas are red herrings e.g. if somebody is controlled by an employer by more than 50% of their time in work then they are a servent irrespective of other areas so the master has the duties to manage and provide PPE where the RA indicates the need

As for tax and especially social security areas your company is at a very high risk especially so as the HSE do not enforce whereas the other areas very much proactively do and they use an additional formula to work out who is liable for NI, pensions etc.

in my opinion this type of working is used by employers to try to get away with their duties/taxes etc.          My advice to evaluate the control test aspects and go from there           best of luck