Subcontractor PQQ: the twelve questions that predict a bad subcontractor

Most subcontractor pre-qualification questionnaires are twenty pages long and predict nothing. They collect a health and safety policy, an insurance schedule and a signed declaration, the file is closed, and the first anyone learns that the subcontractor sublets its labour, or that its public liability lapsed in March, is when something goes wrong. Having reviewed a great many PQQs and the subcontractors that came through them, we find that a few questions do most of the discriminating. Here are the twelve we would keep if we could keep nothing else, why each one works, and how to score them so the decision can be defended.

Why the questionnaire is your evidence

CDM 2015 regulation 8 requires anyone appointing a contractor to take reasonable steps to satisfy themselves that the appointee has the skills, knowledge, experience and organisational capability to do the work safely, and regulation 15 requires a contractor not to appoint anyone without them. The PQQ is the record that the reasonable steps were taken, and a questionnaire that was never scored is not evidence that anything was assessed. ISO 9001:2015 asks the same question from the quality side: externally provided processes and products are controlled, and providers are evaluated, selected and monitored against criteria the organisation has written down. Upstream, the question set clients use on main contractors is the Common Assessment Standard, owned by Build UK and delivered through seven recognised assessment bodies; PAS 91, the BSI question set that many older PQQ templates were built on, is no longer listed as a current product on BSI's site. A subcontractor holding a current Common Assessment Standard certificate has already answered the generic areas, and the PQQ can accept the certificate for those and concentrate on what a certificate cannot tell you, which is most of the list below.

The twelve questions

1. Which trades do you carry out with your own directly employed labour, and which do you sublet? The single most predictive question on the form. A subcontractor who sublets the package is a layer of margin between you and the people doing the work, and their PQQ has to reach the next tier or it has assessed nobody.
2. Employers' liability and public liability: insurer, policy number, limit of indemnity, expiry date, and the certificate. Employers' liability is compulsory for almost every employer under the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969. It is the easiest thing on the form to check and the one most often found lapsed on site. Add professional indemnity where the package carries design.
3. Who provides your competent health and safety advice, and how often are they on your sites? The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 regulation 7 requires it. A name and a retainer letter is one answer; a consultant who has never visited a site is another, and the difference shows in the RAMS.
4. Enforcement action and RIDDOR-reportable incidents in the last three years, and what you changed afterwards. The incidents matter less than the last clause. A subcontractor who can describe what changed has a system; one who reports nil for three years across a large workforce may have a reporting problem rather than a safety record.
5. Three comparable projects in the last five years, with a client contact we may approach. Then approach them. Ask the referee two things: would you use them again, and did they finish with their own people. The second answer is usually the more revealing.
6. The named supervisors and operatives for this package, with their cards. CSCS, CPCS or NPORS for plant, ECS, CISRS, IPAF, PASMA, Gas Safe, SSSTS or SMSTS, first aid, and the package-specific training. Ask for the register with expiry dates, not the assurance that everyone is carded.
7. Send us a completed inspection record from a recent job. Not the quality policy and not the ISO certificate. A subcontractor who can produce a filled-in check sheet from last month has a working quality system, whatever it is called. One who sends the certificate has a certificate.
8. Describe how you dealt with your last nonconformity. Everyone has them. The answer tells you whether they are recorded and closed or argued about and hidden, and it is the best predictor of how the snagging list will go.
9. Who writes your RAMS, and send us the last one you wrote for similar work. A generic method statement with the client's name changed is the most common finding at RAMS review, and it is cheaper to find at PQQ than at pre-start.
10. Turnover for the last three years and the value of the largest contract undertaken. Set beside the package value. A package worth half the company's annual turnover is a risk to both parties, and a subcontractor growing fast is a subcontractor whose supervision is being stretched.
11. How many people will you have on this package, in which weeks, and what else are they committed to? Resource is the question the PQQ template never asks and the programme always does.
12. How is your labour engaged, and how do you check right to work? Directly employed, self-employed under the Construction Industry Scheme, or agency; and the process for checking right to work for every person. The answers decide which tax and employment regimes apply and who carries the risk if they are applied wrongly, and the civil penalty for employing an illegal worker can reach £60,000 per worker.

Scoring: gates first, then weights

A PQQ that produces one overall mark hides the fact that some questions have only one acceptable answer. Separate them. The gates are pass or fail and any failure ends the assessment: employers' liability and public liability current and at the required limit; no undisclosed insolvency; competent health and safety advice in place; no unresolved enforcement action relevant to the package; a right-to-work process; and any statutory registration the package needs, such as Gas Safe or a waste carrier licence. Everything else is a weighted criterion, scored 0 to 5 against a scale written down before the scoring starts: what a 5 looks like, what a 0 looks like. Weight the criteria for the package, so that competence of the named team and resource carry more on a labour-heavy trade and quality records carry more on a finish-critical one. The weighted percentage ranks the tenderers; a threshold turns the rank into approve, approve with conditions, or decline. Score competing subcontractors side by side on the same sheet, record who scored and when, and keep it. That sheet is what you produce when the declined subcontractor asks why, and when the client's auditor asks how the supply chain was selected.

What approval does not do

A PQQ approved in March is not evidence of anything in September. Three sets of checks follow it. Every insurance, certificate and registration on the form has a date, and the register that holds them should calculate the days remaining and warn at 60 days. Onboarding verifies the named people card by card, reviews the RAMS against a written checklist, minutes the pre-start meeting with the hold points and interfaces agreed, and confirms right to work for each person given site access. Monitoring records labour against plan, progress, quality and safety weekly, with an improvement notice process that escalates in stages and a scorecard that feeds an annual panel review. The PQQ guide sets out the full question set by area and the scoring method in more detail.

The test of a good PQQ

Take the last subcontractor who went badly and read their PQQ. The warning is usually there: the sublet trade, the referee who was never called, the resource question that was not asked. The twelve questions above are the ones that would have caught it. The Subcontractor Management Pack carries the PQQ and scoring sheet, the expiry tracker, the onboarding and RAMS review checklists and the monitoring records built to this method, and the Bid & Tender Pack is the same exercise seen from the other side, with model answers under each Common Assessment Standard area for when a client sends the questionnaire to you.

Updated 17 September 2026: ISO 9001:2026 was published in September 2026. At the date of this update the British Standard listed as current remains BS EN ISO 9001:2015+A1:2024, certificates to the 2015 edition are unaffected, and the requirement to evaluate, select and monitor external providers referred to above is from the 2015 text.