Festival safety doesn’t fail because organisers don’t care, it fails in the gaps – it’s the difference between what a contractor said they would do and what they actually do on the day, or a document that was submitted and a document that was read.
If you are responsible for putting on a festival in the UK, managing your supply chain is one of the most consequential parts of your safety role. Get it right and your contractors become an extension of your safety management system. Get it wrong and you have people on your site operating outside the standards you agreed, under your licence, with your audience around them. This guide sets out what good contractor management looks like in practice.
Why contractor management matters legally
The starting point is understanding what the law requires of you. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places a duty on employers and those in control of premises to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of people who are not their employees, including contractors and the visiting public. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require you to coordinate health and safety arrangements with anyone sharing your workplace, which on a festival site means every contractor on it.
Where your event involves the construction, installation, or dismantling of temporary structures, such as stages, towers, grandstands, tensile structures, the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 (CDM) will also apply, bringing additional duties around the appointment of designers and contractors and the production of a construction phase plan.
Having a folder full of supplier documents doesn’t discharge your legal duty. The question, if something goes wrong, isn’t whether you collected the paperwork. It is whether you took reasonable steps to ensure your contractors were working safely.
Step one: Define what you need from suppliers before they arrive on site
Good contractor management starts well before the event. The first step is being clear, in writing, about what you expect from every supplier working on your site. This means setting out your documentation requirements early, not two weeks before the show, and being specific about what you need rather than sending a generic request.
As a minimum, most festival organisers should be asking for the following from each contractor:
- A risk assessment that is specific to the work they will be carrying out on your site, not a generic template with every hazard rated as medium. If a contractor’s risk assessment doesn’t mention anything specific to your event (i.e. your site layout, your event type, the proximity of other contractors or the public) it has probably been copied from last year, or from someone else entirely.
- A method statement that describes, in practical terms, how they intend to carry out their work safely. The test to apply is straightforward: if you handed this document to the person doing the job, would it help them do it more safely? If the answer is no, ask what it is actually for.
- A public liability insurance certificate that is current and covers the scope of work being carried out. Check the expiry date and the level of cover.
- Proof of competency relevant to their work: qualifications, training records, or industry accreditations as appropriate. For work involving electrical distribution, temporary structures, or specialist equipment, this matters enormously.
For contractors working under CDM, you will also need to confirm the appointment of a Principal Designer and Principal Contractor where the project is notifiable, and ensure a Construction Phase Plan is in place before work begins.
Step two: Actually read what they send you
This is where a great many festival safety systems break down. The documents arrive, they go into a folder, the box is ticked. Supplier compliance is one of the most common gaps in event safety management, because oversight doesn’t exist.
Reading contractor documents means checking that they are credible, that the risk assessment reflects the work being done, the method statement aligns with how the contractor actually operates, and the insurance certificate covers the right activities and hasn’t expired.
Where documents are clearly generic, AI-generated without meaningful editing, or simply don’t reflect what the contractor will be doing on your site, send them back. A crowd management plan that reads as a standard template and makes no reference to your event, your site, or your audience profile isn’t fit for purpose, however many pages it runs to. If a contractor pushes back on this, that response tells you something important about how they approach safety management generally.
Step three: Brief your contractors before they start work
Documentation tells you what a contractor intends to do. The site briefing is where you confirm that the people doing the work understand what is expected of them.
Every contractor team working on your site should receive a briefing before they begin work – a proper briefing covering the site layout, the event programme, the communication structure, the emergency procedures, welfare facilities, and anything site-specific they need to know about.
The briefing is also the moment to communicate the boundaries of each contractor’s working area, confirm the arrangements for working in close proximity to other contractors, and check that the people on the ground understand the safe systems of work described in their method statements. Keep a record of who was briefed, when, and what was covered.
Step four: Check what they are actually doing on site
Submitting documentation and receiving a site briefing doesn’t guarantee that a contractor will work to the standard described. Checking that they are is part of your role as the event organiser. You should consider building structured site inspection into your event management programme: pre-doors walkrounds, periodic checks during the build, and specific sign-off points before public areas open.
A pre-doors site inspection is the last opportunity to catch what the build phase missed. Egress routes that look fine on a site plan are sometimes a different story on the ground – gates shown as open are padlocked, fire exits blocked by equipment that was moved on build day, emergency routes that are perfectly adequate at half capacity and completely inadequate when six thousand people need to use them simultaneously.
- Walk the routes as built, not as drawn
- Check that signage is visible at crowd level
- Check that staff know what they are opening, where it leads, and what to do when people start pushing
When you find a contractor working outside their agreed method statement, that needs to be addressed immediately. Document what you found and what action you took.
Step five: Integrate contractor plans into your wider safety management
Individual contractor documents are only useful if they connect to the overall event safety management plan. An ESMP that sits in an inbox unread, a crowd management plan that the event management team has never reviewed, a medical plan that the site team has never been briefed on – these are plans that will likely fail the moment they are needed.
The Purple Guide, the event industry’s primary UK guidance document, is clear on this. Your ESMP should integrate the arrangements of all contractors on site into a coherent whole, with clear lines of responsibility, communication protocols, and escalation procedures that everyone understands.
That means making sure your contractors’ plans connect with each other. The crowd management contractor needs to understand the emergency evacuation procedures. The infrastructure team needs to understand the communication structure. The catering operators need to know who to contact if there is an incident in their area.
Step six: Debrief properly after the event
The debrief is where festivals get safer between events. Most don’t have one, or they have one that amounts to “that went well, same again next year.” A proper debrief captures what went wrong, what nearly went wrong, what worked, and what needs to change. It involves the people who were actually on the ground and produces a written action log that someone is responsible for following up before the next event.
If you copy and paste last year’s ESMP into this year’s planning process without addressing the lessons from your debrief, you aren’t managing safety.
The bottom line
Organisers who run consistently safe events are the ones who bring their contractors in early, set clear expectations from the start, check that those expectations are being met on the ground, and use what they learn to get better each time.
If your supplier compliance process needs a second pair of eyes, whether that is reviewing documentation, supporting pre-event site inspections, or helping you build a contractor management system that actually works, that is something we can help with. Get in touch here.
Share Post