CHAS Accredited Contractor
Every question is asking the same thing: who is responsible here?
What CHAS is
CHAS — the Contractors Health and Safety Assessment Scheme — is one of the founding members of SSIP and the name most often written into procurement templates by local authorities, housing associations, facilities managers and commercial clients.
Accreditation costs around £400 a year, runs for twelve months, and is assessed through an online portal. CHAS assessors review submissions within about 10 working days, which is quick enough to matter if a tender deadline is what prompted the application.
Being the default name is its real advantage and also the reason to pause before buying it: a scheme that everybody has heard of is the one most likely to be named out of habit rather than out of policy, and habit is negotiable.
What the assessment wants
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A written health and safety policy
, signed by the most senior person in the business, covering a statement of intent, who is responsible, and how safety is actually managed. For a sole trader or a small firm, a simple policy is accepted.
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A risk assessment procedure
Evidence of assessments for your main activities that identify hazards, evaluate risk and list controls.
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Method statements
For the higher-risk things your trade does.
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Employer’s liability insurance
, minimum £5m. Legally required once you have employees; sole traders with none are exempt.
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Public liability insurance
, minimum £5m — higher than several comparable schemes, and the single most common reason a submission comes back.
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An accident recording system
, capturing work-related accidents and near misses.
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A RIDDOR procedure
Demonstrating you know what is reportable and how you would report it.
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Training records and competence evidence
For everyone: inductions, trade qualifications, and safety tickets such as CSCS, IPAF and PASMA.
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A named responsible person
For health and safety within the business.
What you have to keep doing
Renew annually with updated documents.
Keep the documents current — risk assessments and method statements have to change when your work or the legislation does, not when the renewal reminder arrives.
The question underneath all of it
Read that requirement list again and notice what it is really testing. Not whether you are safe — nobody can assess that from a portal. It is testing whether there is a person in the business who owns safety, and whether that ownership leaves a trace.
The named responsible person requirement makes it explicit, and it is the one that stops sole traders in their tracks. If the business is you, the answer is you, and the honest version of that is a policy signed in your own name saying so. People hesitate because it feels like claiming an expertise they do not have. It is not that. It is stating who decides, which in a one-person firm is not really in doubt.
Everything else is the same idea in different clothes. The accident record exists so that when something happens, somebody writes it down. The RIDDOR procedure exists so that somebody knows the threshold. The training matrix exists so somebody is tracking expiry. Each is a proxy for a named human being paying attention.
That framing makes the submission much easier to write, and it is also why the documents cannot be borrowed. A downloaded policy template with another firm’s activities in it fails not because assessors detect plagiarism but because the risk assessments do not match the work, and the mismatch is obvious.
The insurance limits are what actually fail submissions
Worth its own heading because it is so consistent and so avoidable.
CHAS asks for £5m public liability. A great many small trade policies are written at £1m or £2m, because that is the default a broker offers and nobody revisits it. The firm submits, fails on a single line, and loses a fortnight at exactly the moment a tender was due.
The fix costs less than people expect — the step from £2m to £5m on a small trade policy is usually modest — but it has to happen before the submission and ideally at your renewal rather than mid-term, when insurers charge to endorse a change.
So the sequence that works: check your certificate before you start the application, not while filling it in. If the limit is short, speak to the broker first. And note the number your other target schemes want too, because there is no sense buying £5m this month and discovering next month that a client’s preferred scheme wants £10m.
The mistakes we see most
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Submitting on £2m public liability.
One line, one failure, a fortnight gone.
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Borrowed risk assessments.
They describe somebody else’s work and it shows immediately.
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Leaving the responsible person blank.
In a one-person business the answer is you.
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Updating documents only at renewal.
The obligation is to keep them current, and an assessment reads the dates.
What happens if you fail, which is more ordinary than it sounds
Firms treat a failed submission as a verdict. It is closer to a returned form, and knowing that in advance changes how you approach the whole thing.
A submission that does not pass comes back with the specific points that fell short, and you correct and resubmit. It is not published anywhere, it is not visible to clients, and it does not sit on a record that follows you around. The scheme’s interest is in getting you through, not in filtering you out — assessors deal with incomplete packs all day.
The failures cluster in a short list, and almost all of them are documentation rather than substance: an insurance limit below the threshold, risk assessments that describe generic activities instead of yours, method statements missing for something obviously high-risk in your trade, training evidence that has expired, or no named responsible person.
Notice what is not on that list — actually being unsafe. Firms fail this assessment for having the wrong paperwork about safe work, not for unsafe work, which is exactly why an experienced, careful trade can be caught out by it and why it is worth doing calmly rather than defensively.
The practical consequence is about timing rather than pride. Build in a round trip. If a tender closes in three weeks and you have not applied, assume you will submit, get points back, and resubmit — and start now rather than in a fortnight. Firms that leave no room for a correction are the ones for whom a single insurance line becomes a lost contract.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Insurance limits and renewal dates are held as records with reminders, which matters here specifically: the scheme fails you on a number, and the number lives on a certificate nobody looks at between renewals.
Accidents and near misses are logged against the job and the person as they happen, so the accident recording system the assessment asks for is something you already operate rather than something you describe.
Questions contractors ask
Is CHAS better than the alternatives? For assessment purposes they are equivalent under SSIP. CHAS is the name most often written into procurement templates, which is a different kind of advantage.
I am a sole trader with no employees — do I need employer’s liability? Not legally, and CHAS exempts you. Public liability still applies.
How long does it take? About 10 working days once submitted. The slow part is assembling documents.
Do I need method statements for everything? For the higher-risk activities your trade actually performs. A list covering work you never do is a longer document and a weaker one.
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