About the SSIP Forum

Purpose

• act as an umbrella organization to facilitate mutual recognition between health and safety pre-qualification schemes wherever it is practicable to do so.
• actively advise and influence clients about acceptable interpretation and appropriateness of health and safety competence standards in UK schemes.
• embrace the core guidance on competence and training in the Approved Code of Practice (ACoP) of the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2007.

Background

The revised Construction (Design & Management) Regulations, which came into force in April 2007, introduced the Stage 1 Core Criteria for assessing health and safety competence of contractors and consultants working in the construction industry. The introduction of these competence criteria provided an opportunity for existing health and safety prequalification schemes to build on and formalise mutual recognition already in operation amongst some schemes.

In April 2007, an initial meeting was held at the Health & Safety Executive's Headquarters, which included representatives from the Contractors' Health and Safety Assessment Scheme (CHAS), Constructionline, Exor Management Services and the National House-Building Council (NHBC) to discuss the potential for the SSIP Forum.

Following further regular meetings over the next two years, SSIP Forum founder members agreed and signed up to an ethos that it should act as an umbrella organization to facilitate mutual recognition between health and safety pre-qualification schemes wherever it is practicable to do so.

Importantly, the SSIP Forum will work to actively advise and influence clients (buyers) on acceptable interpretation and appropriateness of health and safety competence standards in the UK.

Both public and private sector clients (buyers) who run their own approved or preferred list of contractors require contractors and consultants wishing to be placed on those lists to have their health and safety competence assessed at the pre-qualification stage This places a time-consuming and costly burden on all parties involved which is further exacerbated by the number of times a business is required to go through repeated pre-qualification.

The Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) commissioned Ann Glover to report on prequalification in the supply chain and make recommendations on what is needed to drive out bureaucracy.

The recommendations can be found in her report Accelerating the SME economic engine and are now being taken forward by the Office for Government Commerce.