SSIP — Safety Schemes in Procurement
You cannot get SSIP accredited
What SSIP actually is
SSIP is an umbrella body. Its members — CHAS, SafeContractor, Constructionline, Acclaim, Avetta and others — assess health and safety against a shared core standard and agree to recognise each other’s assessments.
That is the whole mechanism, and it is routinely misunderstood. There is no SSIP application form. There is no SSIP certificate with only SSIP’s name on it. You apply to a member scheme, that scheme assesses you, and SSIP is the agreement that makes the result portable.
Working through a member costs around £350 a year at the lower end, renewing annually, and what you receive is a member scheme’s certificate plus an SSIP dossier reference behind it.
The practical consequence is the useful part. When a client asks for health and safety prequalification, you do not complete their preferred scheme’s assessment from scratch. You direct them to the certificate you already hold, and under the SSIP agreement they should accept it.
What the assessment covers
All member schemes assess the same core criteria, which is precisely why the results are interchangeable:
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A health and safety policy
, appropriate to the size of the business.
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Risk assessments
For your main work activities.
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Method statements
Safe systems of work for the higher-risk things you do.
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Insurance
, at the limits your chosen scheme sets. This is one of the places members differ, so check the number before you pick.
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Accident records
, and a system that produces them.
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Training evidence
For everyone who works for you.
If you have those six things in a state you could hand to a stranger, you are most of the way through any SSIP member’s assessment. If you do not, no scheme is going to be quick.
Choosing which member to apply through
This is the only decision that matters, and it is not a technical one.
The assessments are equivalent by design, so you are not choosing on rigour. You are choosing on which name your clients already type into their procurement system — because although recognition is the rule, a procurement officer working from a template that says one scheme’s name is a human being with a habit, and habits are what you are actually navigating.
So the order is: find out what your three biggest clients or targets ask for, then buy that. Not the cheapest, not the best known, not the one a mailshot recommended. If they differ, buy the one the largest of them asks for and use recognition for the rest.
The second consideration is what else comes bundled. Some members sell health and safety assessment alone; others wrap it inside a wider prequalification covering finance, quality and environmental policy. If a client wants that wider pack, buying an H&S-only scheme means doing the rest separately anyway.
What SSIP does not cover, which is most of what clients want
Here is the limitation nobody explains, and it causes more wasted money than any other misunderstanding in this area.
SSIP is health and safety. That is all it is.
It does not assess your financial standing. It does not assess quality management. It does not look at your environmental policy, your equality and diversity policy, your insurance beyond the H&S-relevant limits, or your client references.
Larger buyers — housing associations, local authorities, main contractors — routinely want all of those. So a firm that has bought an SSIP member scheme and believes itself prequalified discovers at the tender stage that H&S was one section of six, and the other five are still blank.
That is the honest reason wider registers exist and why they cost more. It is also why the sequence matters: get the SSIP-recognised H&S assessment first, because it is the cheapest and it plugs into everything else, then add the wider prequalification only when a real client actually asks for it.
Buying in that order costs a few hundred pounds. Buying in the reverse order, or buying everything at once because it all sounded necessary, is how small firms end up with four annual renewals and two clients.
The mistakes we see most
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Looking for the SSIP application form.
There isn’t one. Pick a member.
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Choosing the member on price.
The assessments are equivalent; the recognition is what you are buying, and it is worth most when it carries the name your client expects.
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Assuming SSIP means prequalified.
It means the health and safety section is done.
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Not using recognition when asked again.
A second client asking for a different scheme is the moment the whole arrangement pays for itself, and most firms simply reapply instead.
Sole traders assume this is not for them, and lose the work by default
There is a persistent belief among one and two-person firms that prequalification schemes are for companies with health and safety departments, and that applying would be presumptuous. It costs those firms more commercial work than any other single misconception in this area.
The assessments are proportionate by design. A sole trader’s health and safety policy is allowed to be short — a statement of intent, who is responsible, how safety is managed, signed. Risk assessments cover the work you actually do, which for a specialist is a narrow list. Employer’s liability does not apply if you have no employees. The training evidence is your own tickets.
None of that is a lower standard. It is the same standard applied to a smaller operation, and assessors expect a small firm’s pack to look like a small firm’s pack. A twelve-page policy from a sole trader reads as downloaded, because it is.
What this unlocks is worth the afternoon. A great deal of maintenance, reactive and framework work is allocated to whoever is already prequalified, and the pool at the small end is thin precisely because so many capable firms assume they are not eligible. Being the carded, insured, assessed sole trader in a category where most competitors are none of those things is a genuine commercial position, not a formality.
The honest caveat: if you never intend to work for an organisation with a procurement process, this buys you nothing. It is worth the money when there is a specific kind of client you want and cannot currently reach.
Where this lands in Gaffer
The six things every member scheme asks for are the same six things every renewal asks for again, so they are held as records rather than assembled annually — policy, risk assessments, method statements, insurance, accident log and training evidence, each with its own review date.
The training evidence is the part that decays fastest, because it is per person and every certificate expires on its own schedule. Held against the people rather than in a folder, an assessment pack is a report rather than a fortnight.
Questions contractors ask
How do I get SSIP accredited? You do not. You get accredited with a member scheme and SSIP makes it portable.
Which member is best? The one your clients ask for. They assess the same things.
A client will not accept my certificate — what now? Point them at the SSIP agreement in writing. Most reversals happen at that email. If they still refuse, their procurement rule names a scheme and you either buy it or decline the work.
Does SSIP cover anything besides health and safety? No, and that surprises people at the tender stage rather than at the buying stage.
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