For commercial contractors
Commercial safety file
Building and fitting out premises that other people are still trading in.
Generate your safety file — R500What the law requires
There is no separate safety file law for commercial contractors. The Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993 and the Construction Regulations 2014 are national and trade-neutral — they apply to commercial work exactly as they apply to every other trade on a South African site, with no minimum project size exemption.
What changes with the trade is the content. The regulations require the file to reflect the work actually being carried out, so the risk assessments, method statements, appointments and registers in a commercial file are driven by the hazards commercial contractors actually create.
Why a commercial file is different
Commercial work usually means a building that is occupied, trading or partly handed over. The technical hazards are ordinary construction hazards; what changes is that members of the public are inside the risk area and the client has an existing health and safety system your file has to plug into.
What to get right in a commercial safety file
These are the hazards that should be reflected properly in the risk assessments and method statements — the parts of the file that are easiest to leave generic and hardest to defend when they are.
The public inside the work area
Shoppers, tenants and staff move through or beside the works with no induction and no PPE. Barricading, signage and separation of public routes have to be planned and recorded, because you cannot control the behaviour of people who do not know they are near a work area.
Hot work in a live building
Welding, grinding and cutting in an occupied building sits alongside fire detection, sprinklers and stock. A hot work permit system, an isolation arrangement agreed with the client, and a fire watch after work stops are what keep this from becoming the incident that closes the centre.
Two health and safety systems meeting
The client or landlord runs their own system with their own permits and their own induction. Your file has to show the interface: whose permit governs, who inducts your people, and how incidents get reported into their process as well as yours.
Documents a commercial scope typically triggers
On top of the core compliance pack every construction file carries, commercial contractors should expect to need these. The exact set depends on your scope.
- —Barricading and public safety checklists
- —Safe work permit checklist and permit issue control register
- —Site-specific risk assessment covering occupied areas
- —Emergency management plan, evacuation appointments and roll call register
- —Site induction register (staff and visitors) and induction training procedure
- —Fire equipment checklist and register with the CR 29 fire appointments
The shopping centre has its own safety requirements — do I still need my own file?
Yes, and the two are not interchangeable. The centre's system governs access, permits and emergencies in their building; your file demonstrates that your company assessed the work you are doing and appointed and trained the people doing it. Most centre managers will ask for your file before issuing a permit at all.
More background: what a construction safety file is and what a compliant template must contain.
Get your commercial safety file in 8 minutes
MySafetyFile generates a complete, site-specific construction safety file — drawn from a library of 351 documents across 9 categories — in about 8 minutes for R500. Register free, enter your project and scope, and download a file that is ready to print or submit. There is no monthly fee, and one account handles unlimited projects.
Every document is aligned with the OHS Act and Construction Regulations 2014, developed by a SAIOSH-registered practitioner, and carries a unique identification code that ties it to the account and project it was generated for.