CHAS is a UK Government scheme that assesses contractors health and safety competency.

The CHAS (Contractors Health & Safety Assessment Scheme) principles and purposes are:

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.

CHAS assesses applicants:

• Health and safety policy statement.
• Their organisation for health and safety.
• Their specific health and safety arrangements to a standard acceptable to our buyers and to others.

Background

In 1997 a group of health and safety and procurement professionals from across Great Britain worked with the Association of London Government (ALG) to develop CHAS. In 2001 CHAS became a web-based system.

CHAS started with two main aims.

• To improve health and safety standards across Great Britain.
• To reduce duplicated safety applications for both suppliers and buyers.

These days CHAS has more than 400 public and private sector buyer organisations, such as councils, housing associations, NHS trusts, including a growing number of large private companies who employ sub-contractors.

The Stages of Assessing Competency

There are three stages in the assessment process from the time a supplier applies for a CHAS assessment, through to working for a buyer:

• The CHAS assessment: if a supplier passes this assessment they have shown they can adequately manage health and safety.
• The employer (buyer) checks a supplier has the ability, experience and resources to carry out the specific work they have applied to do.
  • The buyer will look at things like method statements, specific risk assessments, references, examples of previous similar work, training and available resources.
• Monitoring the supplier when they are doing the work.
  • Buyers will check suppliers are managing the work safely, carrying out the method statements properly, have enough resources, liaising properly, managing the site effectively and providing enough supervision.