CHAS

Contractors Health and Safety Assessment Scheme

The longest-established SSIP scheme, originally created by local authorities, assessing contractors' health and safety management for pre-qualification; recognised across SSIP.

CHAS started in 1997 as a way for local authorities to check contractors once rather than each council doing its own assessment, and it remains the scheme most often named on public sector tenders. Its standard accreditation is the SSIP health and safety assessment; higher tiers add the other Common Assessment Standard areas (financial standing, environmental, quality, equality, modern slavery, GDPR, and so on) for buyers who want a single pre-qualification. The assessment is desk-based: the contractor uploads documents against each question, an assessor reviews them and asks for more where the evidence is thin, and the accreditation lasts a year.

The evidence that passes is the evidence that shows the system works: not a policy alone but the policy, the risk assessments that flow from it, the toolbox talks that brief them, the inspections that check them and the accident book that records what still went wrong. Assessors are used to templates; they look for the site name, the date and the signature that show the template was used.

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