CHAS celebrates 25 years of making Britain safer

In 2022, CHAS turns 25, marking a quarter of a century of simplifying health and safety prequalification and raising standards of risk management in the UK.

CHAS was launched as the Contractors Health & Safety Assessment Scheme in 1997 to simplify the prequalification process and improve health and safety compliance. In the beginning, this saw CHAS carry out health and safety assessments for a handful of clients and contractors. Two and a half decades on, CHAS is the leading health and safety prequalification scheme in the UK, serving over 2,000 clients and 32,500 contractors.

Since the launch of the CHAS scheme, workplace fatalities have halved and employee injuries have fallen by an estimated 220%. CHAS has also driven continual progress in supply chain management efficiency thanks to their commitment to promoting industry collaboration, including working with key industry bodies to develop standards, minimise duplication and reduce costs.

Highlights from the past 25 years include CHAS’s role as one of the architects of Safety Schemes In Procurement (SSIP), launched in 2009 to reduce health and safety assessment costs and bureaucracy in the supply chain by making cross-recognition between member schemes as effective as possible. More recently, in 2019, CHAS became the first accreditation body to deliver the Common Assessment Standard. Backed by Build UK and CECA, the Common Assessment Standard standardises the prequalification process across a wide range of risks, saving the industry time and money and raising standards or risk management. It has fast become the construction industry’s elite standard for prequalification, specified by clients including Balfour Beatty, Costain, the HS2 joint venture partners, Mace, Multiplex and Skanska and the Crown Commercial Service (CCS).

The future will see CHAS continue to support businesses in raising health and safety standards with recent developments, including the launch of CHAS RAMS, which enables customers to quickly and easily create high-quality, project-specific RAMS. CHAS will also expand its support for businesses across the wider risk management spectrum. This includes helping customers demonstrate their commitment to managing issues such as Modern Slavery, Social Value and Diversity and Inclusion.

CHAS’s year of celebrations is to include special offers, new product launches and charitable donations.

CHAS Managing Director Ian McKinnon comments: “We are incredibly excited to be celebrating our 25th anniversary in 2022 and are proud of the role we have played in making safer places of work and reducing bureaucracy for businesses.

“However, our work does not stop here. CHAS is committed to continually raising the bar for health and safety compliance in the UK while raising standards across a wider range of risk management issues.”

“We are looking forward to the next 25 years, supporting contractors in improving risk management and growing their businesses while helping clients become more efficient at managing risk. The future is bright for CHAS and our ever-growing community of contractors and clients.”