We have recently been working to assist a new client to achieve successful reaccreditation to the SafeContractor scheme and, discussing with senior management, they commented that they hadn`t realised what was involved.

For the previous year they had an internal health & safety officer who had pulled together the information required by SafeContractor to achieve accreditation.  However this person had left the business in 2012 and therefore some of the health & safety systems had not been maintained.

Our role was to provide Competent Person advice and handle the SafeContractor work which management had thought would just be to submit a few bits of evidence and that would be that. Unfortunately they found to their cost that SafeContractor requires a lot more and we had to set about putting health & safety back onto the business agenda.

The scheme requires specific evidence that:

• site work is independently audited
• risk assessments covered issues such as manual handling
• staff are routinely consulted
• management meetings consider health & safety
• training records were formally documented

… and a number of other issues.

All of these had to be fixed in order for SafeContractor to consider that the business was worthy of their accreditation award.  We worked closely with the management team to ensure that not only were systems reintroduced to the business but also that good evidence was generated going forwards.

This effort was necessary as this business needs the SafeContractor award in order to work for some of their clients. Thankfully the hard work paid off and the business got the award.

Clearly, this shows the importance of maintaining your health & safety systems and making sure that good evidence is available; as without this then passing any accreditation scheme becomes impossible.

If your business requires health & safety accreditations remember these are not a one-off and you will be required to resubmit every year so it’s important to keep on top of what’s required.