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Common accreditation standards must meet construction industry needs
Common accreditation standards must meet construction industry needs
May 20th 2008
The new corporate manslaughter legislation means that there is a greater need than ever for the protection offered by health and safety accreditation schemes.
Darran Hughes is operations director for the SAFEcontractor assessment and accreditation service at National Britannia, a Connaught plc company.
He argues that setting standards for the mutual recognition of pre-qualification accreditation will be a major step forward. However, he argues, this will only work in practice if the application of those standards is flexible.
With legislation placing an ever-increasing burden on the industry to ensure the health and safety competency of contractors, a reliable accreditation system is essential to determine how seriously sub contractors take health and safety and to professionally assess the suitability of their arrangements.
Many construction firms and developers use such schemes to develop and maintain their approved contractor lists and also to search for new ones.
While these schemes do not remove the statutory duty under health and safety legislation, it does help to demonstrate that a company has taken all reasonable steps to screen contractors before hiring them.
Both clients and contractors gain a wide range of benefits from their involvement in accreditation schemes. For the client the benefits include peace of mind, knowing that contractors hired are committed to safe practices on site, saving of valuable time in the vetting process and the ability to reduce cost or damage to reputation by demonstrating due diligence in the event of a claim or prosecution.
Sub-contractors benefit through saving time and money by gaining widely-recognised accreditation, which avoids the necessity to re-present safety credentials each time they pitch for new business, and the resulting opportunities to secure new business this provides.
There are a number of different accreditation schemes in existence, which have varying criteria ranging from ‘minimum legal requirements only’ to the more robust standards required of the high-risk construction sector where two and a half thousand UK work-related deaths have occurred over the last twenty five years.
Any sub contractor wishing to undertake work for a larger construction contractor has to undergo two stages of health and safety assessment. Stage one pre-qualification standards, the “core criteria”, are prescribed by the Health and Safety Executive in the CDM Regulations Approved Code of Practice, which is further supported by a mandatory Stage 2 assessment.
Once a firm has passed the basic initial stage, which looks at health and safety policy, management arrangements, training records and risk assessment amongst other things, the company can then be shortlisted for a contract. A mandatory stage two assessment then takes place which looks at health and safety specifically in the context of the project in question and its location.
Large companies are keenly aware of the cost to their finances and reputations should there be a serious accident involving a contractor working on their behalf. The introduction of the Corporate Manslaughter Act in April 2007 has understandably made them even more cautious.
The construction industry needs to be confident that the third party accreditation system gives them the protection they need, so recognised pre-qualification standards should set a minimum but flexible standard. For many larger firms ‘minimum legal compliance’ simply won’t suffice, and only best practice will do.
Due to the varying schemes available it would be a big step forward if we could agree on mutual recognition of standards for accreditation, to remove duplication and confusion in the market.
We at the National Britannia group, along with all of the other main pre-qualification providers, are currently involved with the Safety Schemes in Procurement Forum, an initiative set up by the HSE to explore how standards can be recognised across all accreditation systems.
To recognise each other’s standards it is important that we have confidence in each other’s ability in the first instance.
The intention is to establish a series of protocols that will enable other pre-qualification providers to join the forum after an independent audit of their services to verify that they have a robust quality management system, a team of competent auditors and operate to a required benchmark standard.
Mutual recognition of standards is about exactly that - recognition as opposed to transferability. So completing a basic scheme won’t mean a firm automatically qualifies for a more demanding scheme or client.
But it will mean that the various pre-qualification service providers will recognise each other’s standards and know where they fit into the various other schemes and where extra auditing might be required. Recognition is not about a one size fits all approach, but about removing the need for duplication and unnecessary paperwork within a framework whereby we acknowledge that each client’s needs differ.
There is no reason why mutual recognition of health and safety accreditation standards cannot be achieved as long as we are clear about the objective and bear in mind that total transferability, although an ideal, will only serve to devalue the process for those clients with more stringent requirements. What can be achieved however is a robust mechanism whereby pre-qualification service providers are guaranteed to operate at a minimum standard, and where each provider can add on to this core criteria as required by their clients.
In addition to setting recognised standards, it’s important that an independent awarding body be established to certify the quality of accreditation service providers and enable the Health & Safety Executive to endorse those schemes which meet the required level of competence, quality management and service delivery.
I believe it is up to the leading accreditation providers to do more to demonstrate the real benefits of these schemes to the client and contractor market as a whole. Apart from the role accreditation plays in preventing accidents, it can save clients and contractors huge amounts of time that would otherwise be spent in multiple vetting processes.
When you consider the relatively small cost of joining an appropriate accreditation scheme, which can start from as little as a few hundred pounds for a buyer or client, it’s easy to see why these schemes are so valuable.
However, unless we also recognise that clients’ pre-qualification requirements may differ due to their business need and risk management strategy, clients simply won’t value accreditation and may be forced to implement additional internal measures to address the perceived gaps.
Ultimately clients and sub contractors benefit from their membership of accreditation schemesby reducing the risk of incidents on site, protecting their reputation, avoiding costly prosecution or litigation and saving on insurance premiums. In short, such schemes are good for business any way you look at it. Mutually recognised standards would save even more time and money for industry, and make even better business sense.