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CHAS, EXOR, SAFE CONTRACTOR AND CONSTRUCTIONLINE SAFETY EVALUATIONS AND ASSESSMENTS

This article discusses the prevalence and requirements for the companies wanting to demonstrate competence in regards to health, safety and environmental benchmarks for commercial and institutional clients. Although we have headed the article as Chas, Exor, Safe Contractor and Constructionline safety evaluations there any many other named safety evaluators, audit systems and client competence questionnaires. It is becoming very difficult to tender for work for councils, housing associations and larger clients without submitting your company to the scrutiny of third party safety assessment auditors. These safety specialists generally have an academic view of safety and are encouraged by the their clients to carry out a fairly rigorous review of the safe systems of work that are employed by a service provider or contractor. The level, quantity and degree of documentation may not accord with the applicants initial view of the overall working requirement of a company but if your company wants to bid for the work you can be sure that the initial CHAS type safety assessment is only a precursor to the management systems you will be encouraged to employ if you are engaged to carry out the works in the public sector in the long and short term. I have deliberately not mentioned a trade or the vocation speciality of the enterprise bidding for work and or under consideration because the safety evaluations are applied equally to designers, professionals, builders, nursing staff and many other disparate service providers, it is our belief that there is a very pressing motivation for all clients to assess their service providers over the long term. The workplace has developed into a very litigious place to operate within and the procuring client will want to reduce the risk of accidents and ill health together with limiting the liability of a negligence claim from the long tail of a service contract. Solicitors are using every route imaginable to secure claims for work persons who have sustained injury and illness and can no longer work, good audit trails can identify the cause of an accident and save a vast amount of effort to offer recompense to victims of tragic events and to spotlight employers who are provably negligent.

So why are these clients interested in what level of competence my company retains or has achieved?

We believe that because of the fragmentation of the workplace and delineation of management over many years, clients are relying evermore on third party "unsupervised" skilled service providers to carry out work for them and in some cases they tend to outsource large portions of their safe working procedures, arrangements and work to companies that may have competed primarily on offering the lowest cost for the package of work or contracted service.

The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 has laid down a strict legal duty of care in the workplace for employers or persons instructing work (commercially and in a lay capacity) to provide safe systems of work for the benefit of all work persons and also to those who may be affected by the work process. Clients ( or instructing procurement teams) in the first instance have to prove that they have appointed properly resourced companies who are trained and competent to carry out the "contacted out" function or project. Unfortunately for the sake of brevity the narrative in the paragraph above is a very truncated explanation of the legal duty of directors and managers but essentially anyone (company, institution, council or any commercial, charitable or undertaking) offering a package of work or a contract to fulfil a service requirement have the responsibility to ensure that the person, third party, organisation or company undertaking the work should be competent and not put any third party at risk as a result of the work they undertake for the client.

This throws up a dilemma for the procuring party, do they go for a cheap service provider who may not have the management systems to keep everyone safe and healthy in the designated work place given the tight economic level of the offer for their services or do they go to a gold plated belt and braces corporate service provider who may offer a service provision that exceeds the cost of the outsourced service contract but offers a fully managed service that is beyond reproach.

Therefore it follows that you can engage a service provider without any legal recourse to carry out works that might not be up to a top class standard which will fit the price points and are just operating on the margins of workmanship but how do you know that the chosen economic service provider is not saving money by completely ignoring safety regulations, environmental concerns in a pernicious manner that will affect the health and safety of the workforce, clients customers, visitors in the workplace and any other person who may be affected by the work.

It is easy to see that the procurement team of a large company, institution or undertaking would be very cautious about giving a large order for contract services out to a company or enterprise that cannot prove it has the competence, safe systems and management ability to ensure that coherent safe procedures and arrangement for the work are being implemented in the workplace at all times and also that anyone affected by the work is equally safe, insured and secure when work is being carried out.

What do the evaluation panel or assessor want to see?

(Constructionline, Chas, Exor, Safe Contractor, Achilles or bespoke safety evaluations).

First and foremost the assessor will want to see a safety policy document. Although this declaration is an easy document to produce the clauses of the policy should be very concise and accurate about what your company does on day to day basis and how you will ensure compliance with the regulatory requirements of your business process. Plagiarising a large companies safety policy and then cutting and pasting your name into the document could make your company look very shady or incompetent to manage effectively in normal conditions and what is more writing down your own policy clauses and conditions at the very least should be achievable by most business owners given that it only describes your day to day company duties and how you intend to discharge them. The policy must be signed and dated; the HSE recommend reviewing your policies regularly and or annually and also when the work and or work processes of a company change; hence the date being an important endorsement.

The only challenging part in regard to writing and producing a safety policy document is describing the way your company will do the work it has been contracted to carry out for the client and the noting the actual arrangements you have in place to enable the working procedures to be carried out safely on a day to day basis.

The HSE assert that enough guidance to write a policy is shown in their web archives but in reality the HSE guidance depends very heavily on the "one person" "one duty" or "defined job" principal.

In so much that in an orthodox large company structure it may be possible to promote one person to supervise and carry out a workplace duty and they can effectively record the outcomes but in our highly mobile workplace it might be the case that a few key persons might have multiple roles in the company and they also may supervise work which embrace many topics and disciplines. One person one job is therefore the goal but you may have to modify your procedures to take account of hybrid working procedures; as long as they are safe and accountable you quite within your rights to set your own standards, but they must be obligatory

I.E. The managing director of small company may be a key worker, a work supervisor, a first aid person together with the management role of recording and auditing all of the formal daily duties that are carried out by the small workforce. Conversely a managing director of a large enterprise may have no actual technical knowledge of the practical side of the work that the company delivers but he will normally discharge his duty through nominated competent managers who may also have multi tasking roles but they will normally have more assistance in recording their outcomes to show audit trails of decision making.

However companies are always constituted in many different ways and it is very difficult to apply a one size fits all template to the duty holders, safety procedures and arrangements. Therefore the information that is offered on the HSE web site or sold to you in good faith by a third party consultant may not fit your enterprise perfectly or effectively demonstrate to a third party how your particular enterprise deals with the health and safety management process in the workplaces you control. Making and modifying formal procedures will be part of your quality process to ensure that you have made risk reduction an integral and important part of you company constitution.

Given the likely complexity of the documentation you present to the assessor the main area of competence that third party assessors are looking for is evidence of a working safety culture within a company and confirmation that not only do safe working procedures and risk assessment procedures exist as a declaration but the assessor will be looking for proof that the safe systems of work are used effectively in the workplace. This will require your work persons to undertake safety inductions and regular safety awareness training that have real measurable outcomes that are recorded and form part of a continual worker development program of a given company. In reality this means that small companies will generally attend courses that are provided by trade associations or institutional training and learning providers but large enterprises may have the internal resources to present and deliver internal courses moderated by their own in house safety professionals or competent managers. None of the above precludes a working person having a demonstrable level of competence with nationally recognised accreditation being able to start working straight away for a company with only an initial company induction but the guidance does require anyone working for a company to have regular safety awareness training or tool box talks and the frequency and intellectual level of that training is normally determined by careful management consideration or risk assessment by the management team or safety director.

List of key records that a safety assessor will be requesting;

A signed safety policy.
An organisation chart showing how the enterprise divides up the legal duties and management responsibilities of the company.
A list and record of the training, vocational awards, certification and certificates of accreditation for specialist skills. ( In house induction training, tool box talks checklist and safety awareness records and certificates should also be sent to the assessor, these are not secondary to external certification because they show how your company deals with organising and upskilling your workforce.)
The CV or accreditation of your third party safety advisors and or your in house safety manager.

The second most important package of information the safety assessor will want to consider is the company risk assessment procedures and formal risk assessment policy. Do not be under estimate the relevance of this part of the safety evaluation process. The assessor will be very interested if you retain the skills of an in house risk assessor or buy in the expertise, risk assessing your work processes is especially pertinent in the high risk work areas and is a vital part of the safe working procedures and management systems of a company.

The risk assessments should be task relevant and site specific; ideally they should not be totally generic albeit that certain work processes are repetitive.

The risk assessment should be dated to show when the review was carried out, it should also contain the name of the person undertaking the risk assessment and the risk assessment itself should always show what the residual risk the work person will be exposed to if the control measures are carefully observed. It is a fact that not only should you carry out risk assessments as legal duty as part of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 your insurance cover is conditional on your correct identification of the inherent risks of your work and finally formal risk assessment is one of the ways you can identify high risk work process that may affect the health of your workforce or may trigger the purchase of specialised equipment to carry out contract works.

The third package of information; COSHH could be confused with the risk assessment process because it is a risk assessment procedure, however all clients will want to see if you are using substances or materials that could damage people in the workplace and all materials and substances have some level of risk. Most companies elect to use benign materials or substances but for some work tasks using acid based substances or solvent based materials are unavoidable, remember unless you have carefully considered all materials using the material safety data sheet you cannot assume that they are benign. This means that the safety auditor and assessor will always want to see that your enterprise verifies that you have taken the formal steps to identify and consider safe working processes to reduce the risk of working with materials or substances that might be hazardous to the health of the work force or people in the vicinity of the work process.

As a company you should have in place a perceptible formal process and program of workplace health and safety inspections and also a basic health monitoring system. In very benign workplaces the risk to arms, wrists and the back can be very prevalent if ergonomic workstation assessments are not carried out regularly. Conversely the high risk workplace because of the high activity levels can have latent high risk situations developing because everyone is so busy doing the work that no one takes the time to have a passive walk around the job and check what is going on and who else might be in imminent danger. Because we do not as a rule employ as many non working foremen or supervisors these days the eyes and ears of a workplace role may be taken by an outside workplace inspector, however it is always preferable for the enterprise to have their own safety supervisors and inspectors in house wherever possible.

The safety checklist and inspections will provide evidence to the safety assessor that the safe system of work is working and being refreshed regularly by persons who understand the nature of the work and the work process. Needless to say that these sheets should be site specific, dated and carried out by a named competent person who endorses the observations and identifies any corrective actions.

Currently there is also a major initiative by the HSE to identify and remove asbestos from the workplace and the assessor will want to know your formal policy declarations regarding asbestos and what you will do if you come across asbestos in the workplace. Your policy, procedures and arrangement in regards to asbestos and asbestos containing materials will be very carefully considered, vetted and scrutinised. There is also a mandatory requirement for the workforce to have attended a formal course that provides that you provide information on the identification and safe working procedures that need to be adopted when we suspect that certain materials in our control or on our projects contain asbestos.

In all the paragraphs above the assessor is looking for evidence that the safe systems of work are being applied in a pro active manner within the workplace you control, binding up generic documentation and guidance will not convince even the most inexperienced safety auditor particularly given that they will be analysing your information pack with a comprehensive ticklist and software designed to ensure that “above all” your responses are coherent and in line with say the CDM Regulations 2007 and other regulations which demand that a company has formally agreed and demonstrable safe systems of work.

We know that as audit techniques develop the diversity of enterprises multiply and the number of regulatory benchmarks will escalate and certain topics increase in importance. Therefore one of the areas of consideration is that of the environmental commitment and the stricter requirements concerning rubbish removal and land fill.

In the construction industry there is a binding requirement to develop waste removal plans for larger projects, in an administrative enterprise there is requirement that public transport and travel plans are considered for large workforces. Overall a modern enterprise needs to formally declare their committeemen not to harm the environment and then also show how their business processes deal with the various regulatory requirements. The client's safety auditor will want to know the company possesses integrity, commitment and they undertake the efficient dispensation of good environmental management techniques in way that will not harm our environment. Some assessors may require evidence of a pro active attitude to environmental management and they may want to verify that the company has reached an ISO 14001 standard or have undertaken an independent formal review of their waste removal, recycling program and energy use age. It would be moot to suggest that the previous evidence required by a safety assessor as shown above is in the right order but suffice to say that any formally declared intention or policy needs to have a pro active feedback process that is shown to work; which may in turn generate a record which will form an audit trail of responses if the safe working procedures or system of work fail. When systemic failure occurs it follows that accidents, unsafe incidents, ill health and events fatal outcomes can and will happen and blame will be apportioned the entity who cannot prove good intent. A safety investigator or the safety inspector will always want to consider the audit trail of an event leading up to any unfortunate incident or accident in the workplace, so make sure that your audit trails and records show why you made certain decision. Not only does the law require you to keep records it can save an enormous amount of time if the prosecuting agency decides you have not acted perniciously in a reckless manner.

This list of requirements is obviously not exhaustive but the basic message to anyone producing a safety information pack for a safety is that they need to be quite sure that within the confines of the work they are tendering for that sensible and practical evidence is put forward to endorse the viability of a company tendering for third party works and service contracts.

What other documentation will the assessor require ( non exhaustive)

We always have to caveat any advice about safety assessments with the non exhaustive description this is because there are many different services that we all tender for in pursuit of new business and each service bid will have different scale of technical needs. The descriptions above mainly relate to the duty of care directors hold, the safe systems of work we employ in the workplace and how we pro actively operate those systems; culminating in the need to keep records and show how we made decisions. Below we will discuss some of the ancillary information your assessor will request but we cannot guarantee that this list will be all the information they will want to see or even stipulate.

The safety list and document inspectors always want information about how you present your safety policies, any new process information and workplace guidance to the workforce. This could be mini employee handbooks, induction and management meetings.

They will want to see evidence of safety meetings attended by a good cross section of the company.

You will asked to show evidence about how you select, maintain safe working equipment and carry out PAT testing.

Fire risk assessment in the office, workplace and mobile work site is an element of safety auditing that can confuse a small business but with the removal of the fire safety certification process the need to carry out a fire risk assessment is of paramount importance. Knowing what your staff and or your clients employees need to do in an emergency will be key question raised by the safety assessor.

Risk assessment checklists will be required and they should be recorded in your company archives

If the company has task or job specific safety guidance manuals, specialist working procedures or common guidance for specific tasks the safety evaluator will want to see copies of this information, and information about how this knowledge is transferred to the workforce.

Construction companies will be quizzed on their knowledge of the CDM 2007 regulations and other pertinent legislation. Other service providers in more benign work settings will be asked about how they comply with their particular specialist regulations. If technical standards form part of the regulatory requirements you will asked for the evidence, worked examples and working documents will sustain your claim that you or your managers understand the nature and spirit of the regulatory requirements.

A common way of finding out about the extent and depth of your safe working systems is for the assessor to ask for the index of your safety policy, procedures and arrangements manual ; this can provide a useful snapshot of the company health, safety and working strategy or the freshness of the formal declarations. An old policy document will not make a good impression with clients and assessors alike.

At all times try and add to your existing knowledge and safety documentation by visiting web sites, looking the HSE websites www.hse.gov.uk or www.environwise.gov.uk to garner additional information and have inclusive discussions with your company team about how you can refresh your safe working procedures to enhance the formal information you use in the workplace. Try to make your working documents stand out in a crowd, try some colour and pictures to convey the safety message to users and safety auditors. Having your safety guidance, formal policies and procedures sitting on a shelf in your office will no good at all, you need to be familiar with what you are declaring to your workforce and potential clients. Proving to a safety assessor that the safety and management documents are used without actually accessing the document will also be an uphill task, do not see these requirements as a challenge to your business acumen, have a go at improving your internal procedures it could prove beneficial and make your company more productive.

If all else fails call our consultancy (PH&S 020 8778 7838 www.healthandsafety.co.uk ) who can mentor you, your managers and employees, to help you to fill in the applications and put you on the right road to compliance.

Conclusion

It is always easy for someone in our position to offer advice regarding the application criteria that is needed to have a successful application to CHAS, Constructionline, Safe Contractor and Exor because we have helped numerous companies with their applications. The point of this article is to forewarn applicants that the hurdles to prove compliance are not insurmountable but require good evidence and proactive recorded working procedures to prove to the assessor that your company can be a competent service provider to a council, large client and or institution. If you have problems or you want help to produce a documentation pack or safety application our practice is in a position to offer training, advice, safety policy production and we can also get your company compliant in a very short time. Many companies have good procedures and documents but they do not necessarily form a coherent system of work.

Contact Neal Etchells of Professional Health and Safety Consultants for further advice when submitting your application to a safety assessment agency. www.healthandsafety.co.uk 020 8778 7838 for personal callers or email neal.etchells@btconnect.com

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