Sooner or later a subcontractor tendering for a main contractor's work is asked for an SSIP certificate. SSIP is the forum through which schemes such as CHAS, SafeContractor, Constructionline and SMAS assess a contractor's health and safety management against shared core criteria, so that one assessment is accepted by the others. The schemes are the assessors: they ask the questions, look at the evidence, and pass or fail the application. Nothing on this page, and no document sold here, is approved or endorsed by any of them. Written from the side of the desk that receives the certificates, here is what the questions are and what the evidence looks like.
Where the questions come from
The questions are the law rearranged into a form. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, section 2(3), requires an employer with five or more employees to have a written policy in three parts: the statement, the organisation for carrying it out, and the arrangements. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 put flesh on the third part. Regulation 3 requires the risks of the work to be assessed and the significant findings recorded; regulation 5 requires arrangements for planning, organisation, control, monitoring and review, recorded in writing at the same five-employee threshold; regulation 7 requires the employer to appoint competent help, from inside the business where it exists. Below five employees the writing is not compulsory, but the assessor asks for it anyway: a business that has not written its arrangements down cannot show them.
The questions, in the order they tend to come
An assessor wants the policy first, signed within the year by the person at the top. Then the organisation: who does what, by name, and who provides the competent advice, with their qualification. Then the arrangements, topic by topic, and for each one the same three things: how the business does it, who is responsible, and the records that show it happened. The topics are the expected ones: risk assessments and method statements, training and competence, accident and RIDDOR reporting with the figures for the last three years and any enforcement action, subcontractor selection and control, consultation with the workforce, monitoring and audit, and the hazard-specific arrangements for work at height, plant, substances, asbestos, fire, first aid, occupational health and welfare.
The evidence is what separates an application that passes from one that is sent back. A training arrangement is a paragraph; the evidence is the matrix with card numbers and expiry dates, and the induction record with a signature. An accident arrangement is a paragraph; the evidence is the accident book, the near-miss reports, the investigation with actions closed, and the RIDDOR decision for each injury whichever way it went. A business with no near misses recorded is asked why.
The two mistakes
The first is the generic set: a policy and arrangements bought or copied, with the company name changed and the trades wrong; an assessor recognises one in a page. The second is the arrangement that describes a business that does not exist, with a safety committee that never meets and a monthly director's inspection nobody has done. Both fail the same way: the assessor asks for the records, and the records are not there.
The arrangement that passes is short, specific and true: this is what we do, this is who does it, here are the records. A two-person business writes two-person arrangements. A business that does no work on asbestos says so, and says what it does when it finds some.
What a template does not do
A template gives the business the headings, the duty printed on the sheet, the prompts for what to write, and the list of records to hold. It does not know what the business does, and it does not pass an assessment: the assessor judges the arrangements a competent person wrote and the records behind them, and a completed form with nothing behind it is what they are trained to see through. No document makes anyone compliant. Why we will never call a document "compliant".
Documents for this work
- The health and safety arrangements bundle — all twenty arrangements
- Health and Safety Policy — the statement, organisation and arrangements on three pages; the arrangements below sit behind its section 4
- Health and Safety Responsibilities and Organisation
- Risk Assessment and Method Statement Arrangements
- Accident, Incident and RIDDOR Reporting Arrangements
- Training, Competence and Induction Arrangements
- Subcontractor Selection and Control Arrangements
- Monitoring, Inspection and Audit Arrangements
- Health and Safety Policy Review and Objectives Record
- Training and Competence Matrix and Contractor Insurance and Accreditation Schedule — two of the records the arrangements point to