What to check before a contractor touches a managed property (2026)

Why a quick glance at a certificate is not a check

A contractor sends over their paperwork, it looks like the right pile of documents, and it gets waved through. The trouble is that the failures that matter are rarely obvious at a glance. A certificate can be the correct type and still be three weeks expired. The insurance attached can be a real certificate, just not the policy currently in force, or not in the trading name you are contracting with. The cover can be valid but below the level your management agreement or the freeholder requires. None of that jumps out when you are scanning an attachment between calls, and none of it is the contractor trying to deceive you - it is usually just the wrong file pulled from a crowded folder.

Before a contractor sets foot on a property you manage, these are the checks worth doing properly, and the points where reading the documents carefully, rather than glancing at them, earns its place.

Public liability insurance, and the cover level

Public liability insurance is the baseline for almost any contractor working on a property. It covers injury to third parties or damage to their property caused by the contractor's work, which on a managed property means a tenant, a neighbour, or the building itself. The certificate should be current, in the contractor's trading name, and - the part most often skipped - at a level of cover that suits the work and the building.

A jobbing handyman on a single domestic let is a different risk to a roofing contractor on a block of flats, and many management agreements and freeholders specify a minimum, commonly £5 million and sometimes £10 million. A £1 million policy can be perfectly valid and still fall short of what you are contractually required to insist on. This is why a minimum cover level is worth setting explicitly rather than left to judgement: a certificate below it should be flagged as falling short, not accepted because it happens to be a real certificate for a real, but inadequate, amount.

Employers' liability insurance, where the contractor has staff

If the contractor employs anyone, employers' liability insurance is not optional - it is a legal requirement under the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969, generally to a minimum of £5 million, and the certificate must be available. A roofing firm sending three people to a job needs it; a genuine sole trader working alone does not. The point to check is simple: if the work involves a team rather than one person, employers' liability belongs on the list alongside public liability, and its absence is worth a question rather than an assumption.

Gas work: Gas Safe registration

Anyone carrying out gas work in a property must be on the Gas Safe Register. The detail that catches people out is that registration is specific in two ways. It is the individual engineer who is registered, not simply the company, so a company appearing on the register does not tell you the person turning up is qualified. And registration is by category of work - boilers, cookers, fires, commercial - so an engineer registered for domestic boilers is not automatically cleared for the job in front of them. For a managed property with a gas supply, the engineer's registration and categories are one of the few checks that cannot be skipped or softened.

Electrical work: competence and the condition report

For electrical work, competence is demonstrated through membership of a registered competent person scheme such as NICEIC or NAPIT, and that membership is the check on the contractor. Separately, the condition of a property's installation is evidenced by an Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR), and in England a rented property requires a valid EICR, renewed at least every five years, as set out in the government guidance for the private rented sector. When you onboard an electrical contractor, the scheme membership tells you they are competent to do the work; the EICR is the property record that work produces or relies on.

Asbestos: the buildings built before 2000

Any building built before the year 2000 may contain asbestos, and the common parts of a block of flats count as non-domestic premises, which carries a duty to manage asbestos under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012. For a contractor, the risk is disturbing an asbestos-containing material without knowing it is there - drilling, cutting or stripping out in an older building. Before intrusive work in a pre-2000 building the relevant survey should be in place, and a contractor who might disturb materials should hold asbestos awareness training. The check here is less about a single certificate and more about whether the contractor will start cutting into an old ceiling before anyone has established what it is made of.

Higher-risk work: a RAMS

For anything beyond routine maintenance - work at height, roofing, anything that affects the structure or other trades - a Risk Assessment and Method Statement is the document that shows the contractor has thought the job through before starting. On work running under a principal contractor or CDM 2015, it is usually expected. A sound RAMS is specific to the job in front of it; a generic template with the company name changed and nothing else is a flag in itself, because it tells you the contractor has not actually assessed this job.

Right to work, identity, and entering occupied homes

Where you are engaging people directly rather than through an established company, identity and right to work can matter, and the government's right to work guidance sets out what counts as evidence. Separately, where a contractor will be entering occupied homes, and especially where tenants may be vulnerable, some agents require a DBS check as a matter of policy. Neither applies to every engagement, but where they do apply they belong in the onboarding form rather than in an awkward conversation after the fact.

Waste: who carries it away

A job that produces waste - a strip-out, a refurbishment, a roof replacement - raises a check that is easy to forget: a contractor transporting that waste must be a registered waste carrier, and you have a duty of care for the waste your property produces. You can confirm a carrier on the public register. For routine maintenance it rarely arises; for anything that fills a skip, it is worth asking before the skip turns up.

A worked example: a submission that looks fine and is not

It helps to see how these checks fail in practice, because they rarely fail one at a time. Take a roofing contractor you are onboarding for a block, where you require £5 million of public liability cover. They submit three documents: a public liability certificate, a second insurance document, and a RAMS.

At a glance it is a complete pile - insurance, more insurance, a method statement, tick. Read properly, it is three problems. The first public liability certificate is genuine but dated last year, and it expired two months ago. The second insurance document is current, which is reassuring until you notice it shows £1 million of cover against the £5 million you required. And the RAMS is a generic template - the hazards listed are the usual ones, but nothing in it is specific to this roof, this access, or this building.

None of those three would reliably survive a careful read, and none of them survives a quick one. Surfaced together, they give you a clear instruction: send it back asking for a current certificate at the right level of cover, and a RAMS written for this job. The contractor sorts it, resubmits, and you approve against documents that are actually in order - rather than approving a pile that looked about right and finding out later that it was not.

What automated review catches that a glance misses

The reason to read documents with a tool rather than by eye is not that people cannot read a certificate. It is that the same person reading the hundredth certificate of the month stops seeing the date. When a contractor's documents are reviewed automatically, each one is read and assessed on the things that actually fail:

• Expiry. The expiry date is extracted and the document is flagged if it has lapsed, or if it expires within the next month, so a soon-to-lapse certificate is caught before it becomes a problem.
• Wrong document. If what was uploaded does not match what was asked for, it is flagged as the wrong type rather than counted as a tick in the box.
• Cover below your minimum. Where you have set a minimum insurance level, a certificate showing less is flagged as falling short, with the shortfall stated.
• A form returned blank. If you ask contractors to complete and return your own form, a copy that comes back empty or barely filled in is flagged rather than assumed to be complete.

You are still the one who approves. The point is to approve against a clear list of what is current, what is expired, what falls short and what needs a second look, rather than against a feeling that the paperwork looked about right.

A note on advice

The specific cover levels, certificate types, surveys and checks that apply to your properties depend on your management agreements, the freeholder's requirements, the age and type of building, and the work involved. This is general guidance, not legal or insurance advice. Confirm the requirements that bind you with your own legal and insurance advisers.