SSIP Guide – What It Is and How It Can Benefit Your Business

  • ISO 45001

Safety Systems in Procurement (SSIP) is a widely recognised UKAS accredited standard that organisations can use to demonstrate that they work in a safe and healthy manner and in compliance with basic health and safety legislation. Read our guide to find out more about the benefits and how to achieve certification.

In essence, SSIP certification provides assurance that an organisation is committed to, and has suitable arrangements in place for, protecting the health and safety of its employees, workers and other contractors who work alongside them.

An ‘SSIP certificate’ is the term used for a certificate that is issued following an assessment by an SSIP Forum Member.

The SSIP Core Criteria runs along similar lines to the ISO 45001:2018 standard, however, they are a little less wordy, and are more specifically set out and aimed at the construction sector. That being said SSIP isn’t just for those who conduct actual construction activities on site such as tradesmen but also covers those organisations who supply materials or services, including consultancy to the construction industry.

How to get an SSIP certificate

SSIP is assessed by one of the SSIP forum members (British Assessment Bureau is a member) against the ‘SSIP Core Criteria’ (a copy of the Core Criteria is available for free as a download on the SSIP website). Organisations must show that they are able to demonstrate compliance against the criteria to achieve certification.

The assessment that you have completed will be tailored to your CDM Duty Holder Status, and your entry to the SSIP portal will reflect the role or roles for which the organisation has been assessed. CDM Duty Holder Status, for which you can be certified against, includes Principal Contractor, Contractor, Principal Designer, Designer and SSIP Approved.

How you get SSIP certification depends on the type of SSIP member you choose to complete your assessment. There are two types of SSIP Forum Members:

Registered Members

Registered members primarily conduct desktop assessments against the core criteria.

Certification Bodies

Certification body members will assess against the core criteria alongside an organisation’s ISO 45001 certification.

For both routes to SSIP certification, your assessor will need to be specifically qualified and competent as an SSIP Assessor.

During the assessment, you will be asked to provide evidence to demonstrate your compliance with the core criteria. This evidence can consist of documented information, records, testimonials and/or via a site visit.

What is the difference between SSIP, CHAS and Constructionline?

We are commonly asked questions about how SSIP works. Questions like “What is the difference between SSIP, CHAS and Constructionline” and “is CHAS and SSIP the same” regularly come up. However, to answer these questions properly, you’ll need a bit of background on what SSIP is and why it was formed.

Due to the high prevalence of accidents, injuries and workplace fatalities occurring at work, the Health and Safety at Work Act was passed in parliament and introduced in 1974 with the aim to reduce these events by enabling enforcement actions to be taken against employers where appropriate measures have not been put in place to protect workers or provide adequate standards of health and safety.

Regulations supporting the Health and Safety at Work Act followed, these being specific to activities and industries. The Construction Design and Management Regulations were initially introduced in 2007 to support those operating in the Construction Sector. The CDM regulations apply across the UK and Northern Ireland, providing specific requirements for construction industries to comply with.

Subsequently, the government and BSI (British Standards Institute) developed a standard set of questions from appendix 4 of the 2007 CDM regulations (Stage 1 Core Criteria for assessing health and safety competence of contractors and consultants working in the construction industry) that could be used by clients who were appointing construction sector workers to provide assurance that the organisation was working in compliance with the regulations. The PAS 91 Prequalification Questionnaire was borne from these core criteria.

Over time, more and more assessment schemes were using the core criteria (PAS 91) to assess organisations and provide a capability certificate that the organisation could use to present to clients when tendering for work.

These assessment schemes included:

  • CHAS
  • Constructionline
  • Exor
  • Safemark
  • BuildUK
  • SEC Group

As time went by, having certification from one or more of these schemes became a deciding factor in clients making supplier appointments. However, with there being so many assessment schemes, all operating under the same health and safety criteria, some organisations were finding that they were having to be assessed by more than one scheme to satisfy their clients’ requirements, yet using the same information. There was a lot of duplication and it was clear that a more efficient approach was called for.

To combat this duplication of work, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) worked with some of these schemes and the SSIP Forum was formed in 2009. The main purpose was and is to act as an umbrella organisation to facilitate and maximise mutual or cross-recognition of health and safety assessments between the member Schemes, wherever practicable to do so, with the aim being to reduce the overall cost and time of health and safety pre-qualification to suppliers and/or buyers.

The SSIP Forum is made up of Registered Members such as CHAS, Constructionline, SMAS, Safecontractor and Build UK to name just a few, and Certification Body members, all assessing health and safety, using the same core criteria.

Having an SSIP member assess your health and safety compliance means that organisations can use their certificate across a variety of SSIP members without having to duplicate the assessment, saving both time and money!

In summary:

  • CHAS and Constructionline are registered members of the SSIP Forum – they assess organisations for compliance with basic health and safety legislation using the core criteria and issue SSIP certification.
  • SSIP certification is a type of certification assessed using the core criteria against basic health and safety legislation and is issued by SSIP Forum Member Assessors.
  • SSIP is a non-profit organisation that is run by SSIP Forum members – in essence, the organisation enables the members of its forum to provide cross-recognition of certificates through its members.

Why every business involved in the construction or demolition sectors should consider getting certified to SSIP

Nowadays the hazards for business owners, particularly in the construction or demolition sectors, are rising, and although injuries and fatalities across the sectors have notably reduced over the past few years, the consequences imposed on employers where accidents and/or reports of work-related ill health are made, are on the rise, with penalties for non-compliance and civil liabilities claims likely to have a devastating effect on a business’ financial stability, particularly in cases where proper controls have not been considered or applied.

One of the biggest benefits of having health and safety arrangements in place is the structured control that it provides to the business, working to prevent and reduce the potential for occurrences of occupational ill health and accidents.

Working towards a recognised standard such as ISO 45001 and/or SSIP will help any business to achieve this structured control and being certified by a UKAS accredited certification body will demonstrate to your clients and competitors alike that you are committed to, and working compliantly to, health and safety legislation. In doing so it will assure them that you are a professional and responsible organisation. Even better, you can improve staff retention by demonstrating to your employees that you will look after them whilst they are at work.

What are the benefits of SSIP certification?

In addition to the more formal benefits of having SSIP certification, such as compliance with legal obligations and needing it for maintaining business relationships with your clients, being certified to SSIP has lots of other benefits, some of these being:

  • Impressing customers
  • Enabling you to maintain contracts with customers
  • Giving your business a competitive edge
  • Winning new contracts with customers, including works in the public sector
  • Saving time on lengthy competitive tender completion and the ability to skip reams of pages on pre-qualification questionnaires by using your SSIP certificate as evidence of your health and safety qualification and professionalism
  • Saving money on insurance premiums.

The less advertised, but just as important benefits of being certified to SSIP are:

  • Having the necessary tools in place to comply with legal duties and therefore reducing the risk of costly enforcement actions and civil liability claims and penalties
  • Improvement of market visibility by being discoverable on the SSIP portal by your customers
  • Having a management system in place will help your business to run more efficiently, and provide you with the tools and tracking solutions for controlling your operations, equipment and resources
  • SSIP certificates can be used to ‘deem to satisfy’ (see below for more information) other SSIP members in respect of the health and safety criteria, meaning less time spent at multiple duplicating audits, and savings on cross recognition.

What does “deem to satisfy” mean?

‘Deem to satisfy’ is a term used by SSIP to allow a business that already has SSIP certification through one of its registered or certification body members to satisfy the health and safety criteria of another member scheme or trade association, without having to be audited again – in essence, providing cross recognition, saving time and resources for the business.

The Deem to Satisfy Chart is available on the SSIP website, and is updated regularly as new members join. So, if you are looking for certification across a number of member schemes this could save you up to 100% of the cost and give you more time to carry on your day job, as opposed to sitting in front of a computer or auditor!

Which businesses can benefit from SSIP?

SSIP certification is beneficial across a variety of sectors, regardless of your business size, and does not just apply to those operating on-site in the construction industry.

So, whether you are a sole trader or have 1,000 employees, or you work onsite or offsite, the benefits of having an SSIP certificate are likely to outweigh not having it.

Of course, any organisation that holds one of the CDM duty holder status roles, as per the table below, will benefit from being certified to SSIP, thus providing the ability to demonstrate their commitment to health and safety, and ensuring that they are complying with the regulations and their statutory duty requirements.

Role Summary Duties*
Client Are organisations or individuals for whom a construction project is carried out.
Domestic Client Are people who have construction work carried out on their own home, or the home of a family member that is not done as part of a business, whether for profit or not.
Principal Contractor Are contractors appointed by the client to coordinate the construction phase of a project where it involves more than one contractor.
Contractor Those who do the actual construction work and can be either an individual or a company.
Principal Designer Are designers appointed by the client in projects involving more than one contractor. They can be an organisation or an individual with sufficient knowledge, experience and ability to carry out the role.
Designer Those, who as part of a business, prepare or modify designs for a building, product or system relating to construction work.
Worker Are the people who work for or under the control of contractors on a construction site.

However, it is little known that for those that fall outside of the CDM Duty holder roles, but who still need SSIP certification to get work and/or operate within industries regulated by the CDM Regulations, the SSIP forum has assigned a special category – this is known as SSIP Approved*.

SSIP Approved Is for organisations that operate outside of the construction industry or are consultants that are not classed as a contractor by way of CDM 2015 Regulations, the Safety, Health and Welfare at work (construction) Regulations 2013, CDM Regulations NI 2016

In summary, there is a multitude of businesses that can get SSIP and benefit from the certification, in particular:

  • Construction management organisations and property developers
  • Those who supply trade services (contractors and subcontractors) such as groundworkers, civil engineers, brick layers plumbers & heating engineers, carpenters & joiners, electricians, painters and decorators, scaffolders, roofers, and landscapers, to name just a few, right through to divers, rope access technicians, welders and fabricators and demolition workers
  • Those who supply materials or products ranging from aggregates, bricks, mortar, and plaster right through to paint, timber, ducting, wall installations, precision engineered parts, fuse boards and 1st/2nd fixing supplies**
  • Those who provide work equipment to the industry including plant and machinery, welfare units and vans, ground and noise protection, bowsers, barriers and fencing, lighting, and traffic management equipment**
  • Those who provide consultancy in any form – this can be anything from the provision of operational management or health and safety, environmental consultancy through to surveyors, engineers, and other technical consultancy services.
  • Those involved in design work for projects from concept to handover and ranging across new builds to refurbishment and regeneration projects such as architects, and those contributing to the design processes such as structural engineers, MEP engineers, fire, acoustics, surveyors, and other consultants to name just a few. There are specialist categories for those who are involved in design: these being Designer and Principal Designer roles.

Take the next steps to SSIP certification

British Assessment Bureau offers SSIP certification when completed in conjunction with ISO 45001 certification. If you’d like to discuss your SSIP needs with one of our experts, you can send us a message or call us on 0800 404 7007. If you’d like to find out more about ISO 45001, click here.

References

*Supplies of resources to the building trade are often highly regulated to ensure that the specifications meet the standards required for safe construction, and clients, property developers and construction firms will often want to be reassured that their suppliers are operating their own safety management systems and comply to basic health and safety requirements.

**Reference information from https://www.hse.gov.uk/pUbns/priced/l153.pdf