The reality of contractor compliance in housing: How providers can close the gap between process and reality

For housing associations, contractor compliance has stopped being a back-office concern. It now sits at the heart of resident safety, service delivery and regulatory assurance – touching everything from repairs and maintenance to building and fire safety, complaints and board-level confidence. 

A recent SafeContractor webinar, The reality of contractor compliance in housing associations, brought together procurement, safety and supply chain leaders to explore what that reality looks like in practice, not the theory or tick-box version of compliance, but the day-to-day challenge of managing contractors across thousands of occupied homes. 

Speakers included: 

• Anthony Hanley, Senior Vice President of Strategic Growth, SafeContractor (chair) 

• Emma Briggs, Director of Procurement and Commercial, Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing 

• Jody Adams, Group Director of Procurement and SRM, Peabody 

• Jay Malone, Head of Group Safety, SureServe Group 

• Tom Bevan, Senior Commercial Lead for Housing, SafeContractor 

“When we talk about contractor compliance in housing, this isn’t a technical or administrative exercise. It’s about real people doing real work and whether they go home safely.” – Anthony Hanley 

Not harder to manage, but harder to be a contractor 

A common assumption is that managing contractors has simply become harder. The panel offered a more nuanced view: the challenge is not just about oversight, but about the growing weight of expectations placed on everyone involved in delivering services safely. 

For Jody Adams, the work doesn’t feel harder, but it has become far more important. The list of “asks” placed on suppliers has expanded well beyond, “Can you deliver this repair?”, now taking in KPIs, cyber security credentials, social value and ESG performance, all managed throughout the life of a contract rather than just at award. 

Emma Briggs reframed it entirely: it may actually be harder to be a contractor than to manage one. Since COVID-19 and the Grenfell tragedy, the volume of regulation, audits and standards has risen sharply, and those expectations cascade straight through to the supply chain. Contractors must now prove not only that work was done, but that it was done safely, consistently and with the right oversight. 

The regulatory backdrop is relentless: the Procurement Act 2023, the Building Safety Act, Awaab’s Law (with phase two on the way), the Renters’ Rights Bill, an expanding modern slavery regime and growing ESG obligations. Which should providers prioritise? As Emma put it, you can’t, they’re all important, and it always comes back to putting the customer first. 

The visibility gap: who is really on site? 

Those rising expectations make visibility across the supply chain more important than ever. If COVID-19 taught the sector anything, it was about resilience and line of sight. Many providers can name their tier one contractors, but few have genuine visibility beyond them. As Anthony Hanley noted, the grey area of subcontracting has grown dramatically, with tiers two, three and four now common and cases of tier ten appearing on site. 

That raises uncomfortable questions. Are all the contractors in residents’ homes properly insured and competent? What oversight exists over their ESG credentials at tier four? Often, very little. 

Tom Bevan described the concern he hears most: a lack of visibility once work is live. Many associations believe their supply chains are compliant, but the contractors involved may lack the audit trails and ongoing evidence to prove it. Insurance gathered at the start of a five-year programme says little about today. As SafeContractor has explored elsewhere, paperwork on file is not the same as confidence on site. 

From transactional to genuine partnership 

So how do providers close that gap? Not by adding more process, the panel agreed, but by building stronger relationships. 

Both Emma and Jody have been embedding supplier relationship management (SRM). The strongest relationships are those where honest conversations happen early and the focus is on solving problems rather than assigning blame, because when it becomes about fault, it’s the resident who suffers. 

Jay Malone showed what that looks like in practice: carrying out smoke alarm and carbon monoxide checks during the annual gas visit or adding Awaab’s Law visual inspections while engineers are already in a property. Strong partnerships also help both sides handle access barriers, support vulnerable residents and pre-empt supply chain shocks before they become emergencies. 

Throughout, residents remained the heartbeat of the conversation. Closing the gap between compliance on paper and reality on site is exactly where independent contractor assessment earns its place, giving clients and contractors a verified, continuously updated evidence base rather than a one-off snapshot. 

Taken together, the discussion made one thing clear: effective contractor compliance in housing depends on far more than collecting documents at the start of a contract. It relies on ongoing visibility, stronger partnerships and the confidence that the people carrying out work in residents’ homes are properly supported, assessed and accountable throughout the life of the job.