Subcontracting work out: what you stay responsible for

Subcontracting is normal when volume exceeds capacity. What the customer experiences is one haulier delivering their goods, and reputationally — often contractually — that remains the operator who took the booking.

Due diligence ages

Most operators check a subcontractor when they first engage them: licence status, insurance, perhaps accreditation. Far fewer re-check. Operator licences can be curtailed or revoked, insurance lapses, and a haulier that was sound two years ago may be in a very different position now — and nothing will tell you unless you look.

The practical control is treating it like any other expiring document: hold the dates, review on a cycle, and chase before rather than after.

The goods and the chain

Depending on what is being moved, obligations may follow the load rather than the vehicle — temperature control, security requirements, waste documentation, dangerous goods. Passing the job on does not necessarily pass on the obligation, and the assumption that it does is where operators find themselves answering for a subcontractor's shortcut.

In practice: the licence that had been curtailed

An operator passes overflow work to a haulier it has used for four years. That haulier's licence had been curtailed following a public inquiry eight months earlier, reducing its authorised vehicles — a fact neither party discussed, because nobody asked and there was no reason to volunteer it.

The work was performed. The operator's customer, on discovering it during an audit of their own supply chain, took a considerably dimmer view of the lack of checking than of the subcontractor's history.

Common mistakes

• –Checking a subcontractor at engagement and never again
• –No record of which subcontractor moved which consignment
• –Assuming obligations attached to the goods transfer with the job
• –Not holding insurance and licence expiry dates for subcontractors
• –No agreed standard written into the subcontract
• –Finding out about a change in their status from your own customer

Put the standard in the subcontract

Most subcontracting runs on relationship and habit, which works until it does not. A short written standard — licence status confirmed at intervals, insurance evidence held and current, an obligation to notify you of any change in licensing status — costs nothing to agree at the outset and is very difficult to introduce retrospectively.

The notification clause is the one that earns its place. It converts due diligence from something you have to remember to check into something they have to tell you, which is a far more reliable mechanism.

Getting this right

Track subcontractor documents the way you track your own driver and vehicle records — dates held, reviewed on a cycle, chased before expiry rather than after. It is the same discipline as managing compliance across depots, applied to organisations rather than sites.

• –Write the standard into the subcontract rather than relying on relationship
• –Include an obligation to notify you of any change in licensing status
• –Hold and diarise insurance and licence expiry dates
• –Record which subcontractor moved which consignment
• –Re-check periodically — due diligence ages quietly
• –Check whether obligations attached to the goods transfer with the job

One practical test: re-check one you trust

Take the subcontractor you use most and re-verify their operator licence status and insurance today, as though they were new. Not because you doubt them — because due diligence ages silently and nobody volunteers bad news about their own licence.

Licences can be curtailed or revoked, and insurance lapses without anybody telling a customer. A haulier that was entirely sound two years ago may be in a different position now, and the first you would otherwise hear of it is from your own customer's supply-chain audit.

• –Write the standard into the subcontract rather than relying on relationship
• –Include an obligation to notify you of any change in licensing status
• –Hold and diarise insurance and licence expiry dates
• –Record which subcontractor moved which consignment
• –Check whether obligations attached to the goods transfer with the job