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#1 Posted : 30 September 2003 19:25:00(UTC)
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Posted By Leslie
I have between 40 & 50 contractors H&S policies that have been sent to me as Principal Contractor for reviewal. How detailed should I go? Surely its not by job to rewrite these policies but to simply assess there suitability. Any advice or suggestions would be greatly welcome.
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#2 Posted : 30 September 2003 21:20:00(UTC)
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Posted By Steve Sedgwick
Leslie

Reviewing contractors H&S Policies is only one aspect of assessing contractor’s competence and H&S Management capabilitiesthere are many others as you will know.

Many contractors Policies are copied and don’t really reflect how they manage H&S in practice.

You will have to sit down with them and audit them on what their policies state. Choose items from the policies and ask them to prove what they have stated, get them to verify to you that actually carry it out.

You have certainly asked for a lot of bids on this project.

Steve
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#3 Posted : 30 September 2003 23:45:00(UTC)
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Posted By Zoe Barnett
We use a scoring system where their policies/training/safe systems etc are all graded between 1 (dire) and 10 (fabulous). It's subjective but it works and it enables you to deal with a lot of information relatively quickly. If you'd like a copy of the matrix please email me.

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#4 Posted : 01 October 2003 09:35:00(UTC)
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Posted By Ken Taylor
It's certainly not your job to rewrite them, Leslie. As to whether you are to assess the policies, list the inadequacies, assess the other literature from them, assess the actual contractors, hold investigative, interviews, visit their sites, etc, etc, this will be a matter for your job description. It will be a matter for the employer/client to seek to engage competent contractors and for you to play your part as the job may reasonably require.
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#5 Posted : 01 October 2003 10:46:00(UTC)
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Posted By Arran Linton - Smith
If you are part of a team that is running a project requiring between 40 and 50 sub-contractors, may I suggest that reviewing all these H&S Policies is not an effective use of your time.

If they have a written H&S Policy, that is probably good enough, however as your organisation is managing the safety arrangements on this site through the development of a Construction Phase H&S Plan and your sub-contractors have a duty to co-operate with these arrangements, surely the time would be better spent reviewing their risk assessments and method statements for the tasks they are going to undertake.
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#6 Posted : 01 October 2003 13:37:00(UTC)
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Posted By Alan Johnson
Leslie

You could consider contacting John Murphy who runs the Government backed Contractors Health and Safety Assessment scheme (CHAS), and asking all prospective and existing contractors to apply for approval under the scheme. This way the initial checking including policies is undertaken for you, and for a small charge the contractor then receives a fairly through audit which if compliant places him on the scheme database which can be useful to them when applying to other company’s.
Give John a call on 020 8545 3838 or have a look on the CHAS web page www.chas.gov.uk

Hope this is of interest

Alan
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