The Contractors Health and Safety Assessment Scheme (CHAS)

What is CHAS?

Each month thousands of contractors and consultants (suppliers) apply for work with public and private sector organisations (buyers). To win work, they must meet the buyer’s health and safety standards.

Assessing suppliers health and safety competence is usually a lengthy and time consuming process. Suppliers can sometimes meet one buyer’s Health and Safety standards but not another. Being CHAS approved reduces duplication as suppliers compliance is accepted by all CHAS buyers.

In order to gain CHAS accreditation, you need to have certain supporting documents, and procedures in place, to send to CHAS with your application, these include the following (you may not need them all, depending on the nature of your business and the tasks you carry out).

• General Policy Statement
• Organisation for Health and Safety
• Work Equipment Inventories, Training Records and Maintenance Records
• Health and Safety Training
• Consultation Arrangements
• First Aid Arrangements
• Fire and Emergency Procedures
• Display Screen Equipment Assessments
• Manual Handling of Loads Training and Risk Assessments
• COSHH Risk Assessments
• General Risk Assessments
• Asbestos Training
• Health Surveillance Arrangements
• Accident Reporting Procedure and Records
• PPE Records and Training
• Electrical Safety Training
• Contractor Management Arrangements
• Workplace Inspections
• Fire Risk Assessments

Depending on what you have in place at the moment, depends on how much it will cost us to produce all of the above for you – if you don’t have anything in place - we will need to come to your site and see how you work, talk to your colleagues, and set up a health and safety management system to include the above. We will also check that your contractors are sufficiently vetted and we will provide your employees with health and safety training.

You then have to implement the system, and apply to CHAS showing that you are using the system.  We recommend that you use the system for a couple of months before applying to CHAS.

Download a construction safety checklist here - courtesy of the HSE

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