Therser Awarded CHAS H&S Accreditation

Well done to all of the Therser team! After an extensive auditing and compliance process, we were delighted to be awarded our CHAS Health and Safety accreditation last month. The Contractor’s Health & Safety Assessment Scheme (CHAS) is one of the UK’s leading third-party accreditation services – arguably THE authority on health and safety compliance outside of the government HSE. The association’s accredited membership now includes over 1000 client organisations in the public and private sectors, as well as more than 70,000 registered contractors.

What Does CHAS Do?

The role of CHAS is to establish health and safety benchmarks for different sectors in the manufacturing, commercial and construction industries, and to provide assurance for companies doing business. CHAS accreditation gives customers the confidence that contractors they work with are committed to health and safety, comply with all relevant health and safety legislation and are a trusted partner when it comes to record-keeping.

CHAS was set up in 1997 with the goal of helping to improve health and safety standards across the country. From the beginning it has worked in consultation with government bodies to set up a number of important health and safety schemes, including the CDM (Construction, design & management) Regulations in 2007 (updated in 2015) and the Safety Schemes in Procurement (SSIP) regulations.

Practical Achievements

Health and safety compliance is extraordinarily important in any hands-on industry, but everyone recognises that it is also a time-consuming process. No business – and especially SMEs – have the time to be continually filling out forms and undertaking risk assessments for every job. This led to excessive duplication and a slip in standards.

One of the big achievements of CHAS and their partners is to have simplified health and safety by creating standard requirements for contractors anywhere in the UK. This negates the need for individual H&S assessments for every project and makes it easier for people to do business, as well as establishing verifiable benchmarks of trust.

The CHAS Assessment

A CHAS assessment, the necessary preliminary to accreditation, involves an extensive review of a business’s health and safety policies and procedures, including record-keeping, communication and review process, as well as other criteria. The CHAS qualified assessors all have an extensive knowledge base of system design and risk management, and approach each assessment pragmatically – analysing how health and safety good practices are applied in the applicant’s unique circumstances.

CHAS accreditation is therefore an accurate reflection of ‘health and safety in motion’ i.e. how established principles are successfully applied in a working company.

What This Means For You

For our customers, CHAS accreditation means that Therser is a business you can trust with health and safety. Our processes are efficient and effective, making us a business that contractors and customers can work with in confidence; knowing our services are of the highest quality.