‘One strike and out’: Does your health and safety compliance strategy withstand scrutiny?

Nik Flytzanis, Growth Market Director at Once For All (home to Facilitiesline)

Facilities management (FM) can be an invisible industry. When things run smoothly and compliantly, no one notices. But when a single health and safety oversight occurs, the ripple effects can kill a business almost overnight. 

It is estimated that the average cost of a health and safety breach is £107,000 – enough to force many small contractors into liquidation. A single regulatory breach can also remove a firm from the list of accredited suppliers for pre-qualification health and safety schemes, stripping it of the ability to bid for lucrative corporate and public sector contracts. 

But there’s more. With senior managers facing personal liability and unlimited corporate fines, and regulatory bodies achieving a staggering 96% conviction rate for negligent directors, major health and safety breaches can lead to years of imprisonment, personal disqualification, and the complete destruction of a reputation that took years to build.

A complex truth

New research from Once For All, home to Facilitiesline, reveals that FM leaders rate their confidence in supplier compliance at a high 8.5/10. Considering the reputational and financial risks of compliance breaches, this figure may seem reassuring. However, a deeper dive into our analysis of supplier management approaches reveals a more complex reality.

Our research reveals that supplier management in the FM world is largely pragmatic, with organisations relying on a combination of existing supplier relationships, manual checks and established ways of working, rather than standardised or system-led approaches. 

When responsibilities are fragmented across multiple sites and teams, processes heavily rely on manual coordination, and individuals bear the full burden of ensuring compliance, it’s easy to open the door to inconsistencies and inaccuracies.

In a world where a single incident can cost lives and lead to certain business liquidation, this approach is simply not good enough. 

Beyond rose-tinted glasses

While trust in existing suppliers is a positive sign, it is crucial that compliance checks move beyond personal relations and manual checklists and towards a truly data-driven approach. To withstand scrutiny, that 8.5 figure cannot solely rely on blind faith. It must be backed by a digital infrastructure that provides real-time proof of safety. 

In the fast-moving FM world, a contractor’s compliance status can change rapidly: an insurance policy or a certification may expire, a safety check may be missed, or a dynamic risk assessment may be rushed, and suddenly, compliance is no longer guaranteed. No manual spreadsheet can keep pace with it all, and expecting individual employees or teams to manage supplier compliance manually places an unrealistic and unfair burden on their shoulders.

A purpose-built digital infrastructure replaces manual verification with a single source of truth on your suppliers’ compliance status. It can track contractors’ credentials in real time, instantly flag non-compliance, and help teams find the right contractor from a large pool of pre-verified suppliers. 

From reactive to proactive

Relying on automation to support supplier compliance checks allows teams to move beyond the ‘good enough’ mindset. For example, contractors can be evaluated on domains that go far beyond basic health and safety risks, including environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics; corporate policies; and legal compliance. 

Most importantly, a solid digital infrastructure allows the FM sector to move from a reactive to a truly proactive approach. Historically, compliance has often been treated as a periodic tick-box exercise or a post-incident review to understand what went wrong. But what if we could prevent that first strike, acting before breaches occur to prevent accidents and keep people and businesses safe?

This shift requires moving away from the rose-tinted glasses of supplier trust and towards a proactive approach based on objective, continuous verification. 

When trust and visibility go hand in hand

By embedding real-time, digital-first supplier checks into daily operations, FM professionals can ensure their entire supply chain is compliant every single day, across every single site. This not only prevents potential accidents and protects businesses from hefty fines and reputational damage: it protects your teams, too. Removing the burden of manual checks from individual employees or teams eliminates the possibility of human error and ensures that standardised protocols are applied to every job.

Crucially, transitioning to a digital-first approach does not mean abandoning the valuable supplier relationships FM professionals have built over the years, nor does it mean immediately stopping working with a trusted supplier if a non-compliance issue is flagged. On the contrary, this infrastructure allows suppliers to rectify non-compliance issues before they become problems and provides a clear, transparent framework of expectations for what’s required of them. 

Ultimately, when the cost of non-compliance is so high, complete real-time visibility is the only answer. It is time for the FM environment to reinforce trust with hard data, move from reacting to preventing, and build a supply chain compliance strategy that genuinely withstands scrutiny.