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Is WorkerRecord worth £79 a month?

For UK main contractors and principal contractors

Here is the honest answer, worked through properly. Not a sales pitch — an actual comparison of what you're spending now against what you'd spend with WorkerRecord, and what the risk of getting it wrong actually costs.

What managing compliance manually actually costs you

Most small and mid-size main contractors track subcontractor documents on spreadsheets, in shared drives, or through email. The labour cost of this is easy to underestimate because it's spread across lots of small tasks:

• Initial document collection per subcontractor: emailing, chasing, downloading attachments, renaming files, checking expiry dates. In practice, around 30–45 minutes per subcontractor when you include the back-and-forth.
• Monthly maintenance: checking what's expired or about to expire, chasing renewals, updating the spreadsheet. For 10 subcontractors, around 1–2 hours per month.
• Audit or incident preparation: when an HSE inspector arrives or a client requests compliance evidence, assembling the documentation from wherever it lives. In practice 2–4 hours, often under pressure.

At a conservative rate of £25/hour for a site manager or office administrator's time, a 10-subcontractor operation spends roughly £50–100 per month in labour cost alone on compliance administration. That is before any cost of failure.

What goes wrong, and what it costs

The more significant cost is not the ongoing labour — it's the tail risk. Under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015, principal contractors must take reasonable steps to satisfy themselves that subcontractors are competent. A documented compliance record is the most direct evidence of those reasonable steps.

When something goes wrong on site and a subcontractor is involved, one of the first things the HSE asks is: what steps did the principal contractor take to verify competence? A spreadsheet that was last updated three months ago, with a certificate that expired in the meantime, is a difficult position to defend.

HSE prosecution data consistently shows that principal contractors found to have inadequate systems face significant consequences:

• Improvement notices requiring immediate remediation
• Prohibition notices stopping work
• Prosecution leading to unlimited fines — median outcomes in recent years have been in the range of £20,000–80,000 for principal contractors with systemic failures
• Loss of framework contracts where compliance is a prerequisite

Even if the probability of an HSE enforcement action in any given year is relatively low for a well-run site, the expected value calculation is stark: a 3% chance of a £30,000 fine is an expected cost of £900 per year. WorkerRecord costs £948 per year. Those numbers are in the same order of magnitude — and WorkerRecord actively reduces the probability of the enforcement outcome by creating the documented approach the HSE is looking for.

What "reasonable steps" actually means in practice

The CDM 2015 standard is not "did you collect documents" — it's "did you have a systematic, consistent approach to competence verification?" A principal contractor who can demonstrate:

• Every subcontractor was asked to upload their documents before starting
• Every document was reviewed and approved by a named team member
• Expiry dates were tracked and renewals chased proactively
• A timestamped record exists of what was held and when

— is in a materially better position than one relying on a shared drive and a memory of having seen a certificate at some point. WorkerRecord provides exactly that audit trail automatically.

The simple comparison