One safety plan, two work health and safety regimes

A group operating on both sides of the Tasman needed a health, safety and environment plan for one of its business units. The work is done in one country and directed from the other, so two safety regimes apply at once, and they do not use the same words for the people who hold the duties.

The operation is also delivered by contractors rather than employees, which changes who holds which duty and is the part most plans handle badly.

• The group's existing structure kept as the baseline, so the plan sits inside its framework rather than beside it.
• Three sections rebuilt from scratch: the regulatory framework, contractor management, and the responsibility matrix.
• The terminology gap between the two regimes stated in the text, with the duties named under both, rather than covered by a single label that is only correct in one country.
• Contractor management written around the duties that overlap when two businesses share a workplace: due diligence, inductions, monitoring and stop-work.
• Delivered as a clean final document, a marked-up source so changes could be accepted line by line, and a short briefing on every substantive change with the provision behind it cited.

The group received a plan the business unit can be run against and audited against, with the duties on each side of the border stated in the terms that regime actually uses.

A fixed fee was possible because the mapping ran against maintained corpora of both countries’ statutes, regulations and approved codes rather than being assembled from scratch. Same method as the policy work, pointed at drafting instead of analysis.