Health and safety

How we work, and how we say so

This page is written for the person prequalifying RPC: a quantity surveyor building a tender file, a council procurement officer, a school board asking who will be on site during term. It describes how RPC runs a site. It shows no safety rating and no membership mark, because nothing of that kind appears anywhere on this site without a current certificate behind it and a visible date beside it.

Temporary mesh fence panels and DANGER KEEP OUT tape closing off the frontage of a stone church, a boom lift standing at the open entrance doors

How an RPC site is run

RPC publishes four things it calls non-negotiable: on time and on budget, solution focused, no shortcuts and no surprises, and safety always. The fourth is what this page is about. In practice it shows up as four habits, each of which appears in RPC’s own account of its work.

Site access is planned, not improvised: Extra care around planning and co-ordinating every visit to site, including material deliveries and subcontractors. On a school or an operating business that is the whole job: the risk is not the building work, it is who walks past it.
Subcontractors are held to RPC's standard: RPC works with a group of quality-orientated subcontractors chosen to complement its own standards, and commits to a safe and friendly working environment for its own staff and for theirs. The bar a subcontractor is held to is published rather than left to assumption.
The client's people are still in the building: Rangiora RSA, Hamptons ITM, St Albans Baptist Church and Rolleston Christian School were each delivered around people who could not move out. Zones, pathways and staged access are the ordinary condition of an RPC site rather than a special measure.
One conversation, repeated: On Rangiora RSA, fortnightly site meetings involving all main parties are what RPC credits with getting the project through the problems it uncovered. The same habit is what keeps a safety plan from going stale halfway through a build.

Close on two people's hands over a set of drawings laid out on a sheet of building board on a site, one bare hand pointing at the sheet, the other in a work glove

The inside of a partly built room with exposed timber framing, polythene sheeting over the openings and plywood lining fixed to the lower walls, a bucket and tool cases on the floor

A work area sheeted floor to ceiling in plywood and plastic containment, its concrete floor ground back to bare slab, with a large floor saw and spare blades at the far end, a grinder and vacuum hose set down on the slab, a stepladder standing clear, and leads and hoses run out across the floor

Get in touch about subcontracting

Working around a building that stays open

The clearest evidence of how RPC manages a site is not a document. It is that on Hamptons ITM at Ferry Road the business never stopped trading through an earthquake repair and a 3,380 square metre redevelopment, and that at Rangiora RSA the club kept trading in one area while the construction team worked in the other.

“The ITM and RPC management teams worked very closely together to set up progressive access, zones and pathways for staff, sub-contractors and ITM’s valued customers.”
From RPC’s own account of the Hamptons ITM project

Two workers in high-visibility clothing cutting material on trestles outside a part-clad building, with scaffolding erected across the two-storey section beside them

The side of a stone church seen along a gravel path, with a closed timber door in a carved stone surround, a handrail at the step up to it, leaded windows either side, and headstones on the grass and houses across the road beyond

At Rolleston Christian School, RPC worked with the principal so that her students could watch the construction process without it interrupting their studies. That is the same discipline pointed at a different audience, and it was RPC’s second project for The Christian Schools’ Trust.