Consolidation and mutual recognition of pre-qualification schemes is needed in order to reduce the current burden of paperwork and form-filling by construction contractors, argues Paul Reeve.
Checking the basic health and safety know-how of construction contractors before they tender for work is, of course, a sound idea. Over the years, this idea has grown into the phenomenon of ‘health and safety pre-qualification’ but many contractors have become increasingly despondent about being told repeatedly to demonstrate their safety credentials to commercial schemes or clients. While pre-qualification aims to reduce risks, too often it generates unnecessary paperwork and cost for contractors — notably small organisations.
The Government’s Better Regulation Executive (BRE) has highlighted pre-qualification issues in a recent report,1 even though it is a supply-chain issue. The Executive notes: “[T]hird parties are increasingly imposing their own safety requirements on business. More often, procurers, insurers, and training providers demand health and safety assessment. . . For many of the employers that face them, these requirements have become a significant source of health and safety bureaucracy.”
The BRE continues: “A business may be able to show the required health and safety standards under one scheme but there is generally no recognition of this under the criteria of a second scheme. Firms must then pay to submit similar supporting evidence on different forms to different schemes.”
Almost all schemes charge firms for assessment, with fees ranging from over £100 to £3000, every two or three years. They also require firms to produce significant supporting evidence, all of which can lead to duplicated effort, wasted time, and extra cost — most of which exceeds the pre-qualification fees themselves. More broadly, repeat exercises can undermine the hard-won business case for health and safety and, instead, reinforce negative stereotypes — particularly in smaller construction companies — that health and safety is a burden.
In short, the solution to the proliferation of pre-qualification schemes is to maximise cross-recognition between the schemes themselves. It is therefore encouraging to see that key players in the construction supply chain are now actively trying to deal with the situation.
Core criteria
The door to progress was pushed open by a superb report for the HSE by consultant John Carpenter. In his study, Carpenter showed that if there was a set of clear, quality indicators, third parties would be less tempted to fill what they would characterise as an ‘assessment gap’ in the industry with new and costly benchmarks of their own. The presence of core criteria would also allow an assessor to recognise contractors who have already been assessed by another party, rather than requiring yet another form to be filled in.
With these issues in mind, the Electrical Contractors’ Association and the Heating and Ventilating Contractors’ Association launched the 12 ‘core criteria’ with the HSE in 2006, building on solid work that had already been done to consolidate pre-qualification schemes by the Major Contractors’ Group, the Contractors’ Health and Safety Assessment Scheme (CHAS), and others. To some extent, the launch laid the red carpet for the inclusion of the core criteria in the CDM ACoP in 2007, providing consolidators with what they needed — a universal, basic standard recognised by the HSE.
The establishment of the core criteria has already encouraged a number of leading pre-qualification providers to make efforts to recognise each others’ assessment activities through a ‘Safety Schemes in Procurement’ forum (SSIP).
Importantly, the SSIP is supported by the HSE’s construction division, and includes leading assessment players, such as the CHAS, SafeContractor, Exor, the National House-Building Council (NHBC), Achilles, and National Britannia. Construction clients and contractors are also represented, including the Construction Clients’ Group, the Construction Confederation, and the Specialist Engineering Contractors’ (SEC) Group.
The forum aims to achieve mutual recognition of the criteria in CDM 2007, using agreed audit rules. This will help clients and contractors by:
eliminating unnecessary health and safety bureaucracy in procurement;
enabling them to achieve value for money by avoiding unnecessary duplication;
providing confidence in first-stage safety competency assessments through a consistent, reliable, and quality-controlled standard.
Chances of success
Such an initiative deserves support throughout the construction industry, not least because achieving mutual recognition between schemes is a considerable challenge. There are many commercial interests at stake, and the quality of each scheme — not just the standard it measures — will have to stand up to a universally-agreed set of rules. The SSIP has asked John Carpenter to help come up with a workable process that will support mutual recognition, and the target date for agreeing the process itself is the first half of 2009.
Much hangs on the success of the SSIP. Indeed, it is being monitored by others who are interested in how to consolidate pre-qualification across the board, not just on health and safety but in other areas, such as environmental management.
The forum is looking for a ‘one standard, many providers’ scenario, rather than what is currently in place, which is ‘many standards, many providers’. The latter is basically an invitation to generate supply-chain cost, if not chaos.
If the SSIP can agree on mutual recognition between forum members next year, it is unlikely the number of schemes will fall — but the proliferation of new assessment regimes should, at least, be halted. Nor will it matter how many schemes exist, as contractors will only need to fulfil the criteria of one or two schemes, rather than several.
Potentially, the financial benefit to clients and contractors is significant, as the cost of duplicated fees and paperwork is stripped out of the supply chain. In addition, small contractors are less likely to be confounded by the whole process of pre-qualifying for work, freeing them to focus on their management measures and put more effort into reducing risks.
Maintaining standards
So, it appears that government, the supply chain, and the HSE are all on the same page. The BRE report concluded: “[T]he burden pre-qualification schemes generate for firms could be eased by the development of mutual recognition and a more common approach between schemes. This would remove unnecessary bureaucracy for firms while also helping them to improve workplace health and safety, and avoid excessive and costly consultancy support.”
And why shouldn’t we have simple pre-qualification? Simple does not necessarily mean lower standards — and we should not forget, this is only the method to get on to a tender list. Any client, scheme, or major contractor is still free to ask job-specific questions of those that make it on to their shortlist.
References and further reading
1 This year, RoSPA and others achieved considerable success by bringing pre-qualification issues to the attention of government agencies, such as BRE. BRE (2008): Improving outcomes from health and safety, available at www.berr.gov.uk/files/file47324.pdf
2 HSE (2006): Developing guidelines for the selection of designers and contractors under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 1994, prepared by jzcarpenter Limited, available at www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr422.pdf
3 Fidderman, H (2007): Core criteria in pre-qualification schemes, (RoSPA). See also RoSPA (2007): Transcript of proceedings, 23 May 2007, pp15-20, available at www.rospa.com/occupationalsafety/sme/index.htm
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