Is “pay-to-play” becoming a silent health and safety problem in New Zealand industry?
A Quiet Word.
The Government has recently acknowledged something contractors have been saying for years: health and safety prequalification has become repetitive, costly and too focused on paperwork.
One contractor reportedly completed 76 separate prequalifications in a single year.
The Government's new approach is based on a sensible principle:
Contractor management should focus on capability and practice, not paperwork alone.
That principle needs to extend beyond prequalification.
Because there is another cost quietly growing across New Zealand industry: pay-to-play health and safety systems.
Consider electricity generation.
A crane contractor may be required to provide emergency crane support 24 hours a day.
We might have 120 crane operators who could potentially answer that call.
Before one of those people can work at a generation site, several things need to line up:
They must be properly qualified.
They must be competent and signed off on the particular crane.
Their competencies must be current and verified.
They must hold the required digital competency access.
Their employer must have satisfied the principal's contractor and prequalification requirements.
They must be inducted for the particular site.
Most of those controls have an obvious relationship with safety.
But there is an uncomfortable question sitting in the middle.
Why are contractors maintaining the same competency information twice or many times if you exit the electricity generation scope?
Before we are approved as a contractor, we have already had to demonstrate that we have systems for:
identifying competency requirements
recording qualifications
assessing operators
managing authorisations
monitoring expiry dates
maintaining training records
ensuring people are competent for the work they perform.
Those systems form part of the basis on which we are prequalified.
We then maintain those records continuously within our own business.
But to work for some principals, we are also required to recreate and maintain elements of that competency system inside other paid platforms at our cost.
That means the true cost is not simply $120 + GST per worker per year.
It is also:
duplicate data entry
administration
maintaining multiple sets of records
synchronising changes
chasing expiries in multiple systems
uploading evidence
correcting discrepancies
training administrators
managing user access
auditing the duplicate records
and paying people to keep the external system aligned with the system we already operate.
That is a substantial industry cost that rarely appears in the headline subscription price.
Now add the 24/7 operational problem.
If we have 120 crane operators but perhaps only 20 attend a generation site in a particular year, we face a choice.
Pay to maintain all 120 inside the external system so they remain available if required.
Or reduce the paid pool to the people we expect will attend.
The first option costs money for unused standby capability.
The second option can create a real safety problem.
At 2:00 am, the best person for an emergency response may be:
rested
nearby
competent
signed off on the crane
within their allowable working hours
and available immediately.
But if that person is not inside the paid administrative pool, dispatch may have to choose somebody else.
We have now allowed an administrative control to influence a genuine operational safety decision.
That should concern us.
Dispatchers in cranes, transport, utilities and heavy industry already balance fatigue, competency, location, travel time, equipment availability, working hours and site requirements.
Every additional hard gate reduces the available workforce.
There is also a broader question.
If a contractor has already passed prequalification by demonstrating that it has an effective competency-management system, what additional risk is being controlled by requiring that contractor to duplicate those records in another commercial system?
There may be a good answer.
Common industry visibility has value. Portable records have value. Principals need assurance that people arriving on their sites are competent.
But that does not automatically mean the current commercial model is the right one.
Perhaps the answer is:
integration with contractor competency systems
an API rather than a duplicate entry
company-level subscriptions
active-worker pools
short-term activation
emergency activation
recognition of verified employer records
or charging according to actual site use.
The technology exists to do this.
The question is whether our health and safety architecture has kept pace.
New Zealand has spent years adding controls, portals, prequalifications, inductions, databases and verification systems.
Each one has usually been introduced with a reasonable objective.
But layers accumulate.
Costs accumulate.
Administration accumulates.
And complexity itself eventually becomes a risk.
Perhaps the next phase of health and safety reform should ask a harder question:
Which controls genuinely manage risk - and which ones simply duplicate evidence that somebody else has already verified?
That is the conversation I think the industry needs to have.
