Case Study: Subcontractor HSE Assurance on an Abu Dhabi Infrastructure Package

The situation

An Abu Dhabi infrastructure package with 22 subcontractors, several appointed at short notice to recover programme. Two-thirds of the recordable incidents in the first year came from four subcontractors, all of whom had passed prequalification on documentation alone. The client's ADOSH-SF-aligned audit rated subcontractor control as the weakest element of the management system.

What changed

1. Prequalification was rescored against evidence rather than statements: named competent persons, in-date third-party certificates, actual incident history, and a site visit to an existing job.
2. Every subcontractor received a monthly HSE scorecard with the same five measures: close-out of actions, permit defects, induction and competency currency, plant and lifting certification, and near-miss reporting rate.
3. Scores were banded — Acceptable, Watchlist, Escalate — and the band, not the narrative, drove the response.
4. Watchlist meant a joint improvement plan with dated actions. Escalate meant no new work fronts released until the plan closed, agreed with commercial before the first escalation so it was enforceable.
5. Low near-miss reporting was treated as a red flag rather than good news, and the reporting rate was reviewed alongside the incident rate.

Results over twelve months

What made it work

• The consequence was commercial and agreed in advance. Scorecards without a released-work-front consequence change nothing.
• The same five measures every month meant subcontractors could self-manage rather than guess.
• Evidence-based prequalification caught two subcontractors before award who would otherwise have arrived on site.
• Rising near-miss reporting was celebrated publicly, which is what moved the reporting culture.

The package finished with no lost-time injuries in the final eight months. The team's own conclusion was that nothing in the approach was novel — it was applied to every subcontractor, every month, without exception.