We need to provide RAMS to the store when our VM team replenishing stock and place ribbon around boxes. ok fine, if this is what they want however, they want to charge £100 for the time taken for their health and safety team to review these. Where do we stand with this? why should we have to pay!

If someone wants to make a charge to read RAMS then you adjust your price of service to reflect the increased costs to your business charging double to account for having to write the document in the first place.

Pretty pathetic a company should be demanding RAMS for what I am reading as Vending Machine visits.

Ultimately though H&S has always been a business cost rather than an income stream.

We have had clients insisting our staff wear their branded PPE, at our cost, on their sites - its simply added to their invoice.

Just increase you fee for service you are providing! This is a contractual thing not a H&S issue.

Morning Naomi

To add to what others have written.....

Old tenet "what the Client wants, the Client gets".

.....but the supplier need not do it unless the Contract says so, though as Steve indicates even if it isn't in the Contract the Client could take their business elsewhere.

So, starting point is to read the fine print in the Contract.

I very much doubt that there is anything there which says that the Client is going to charge for review of things such as RAMS.

If there is then you probably just have to cough up and make sure that those bidding for work read the small print next time they are negotiating a Contract and if such a provision is included, then price accordingly.

In the short term you could just ask the Client to justify this very small amount of money but even having the debate with them is likely to cost both your company and the Client far more in "opportunity cost", which translates as time which could be spent to better effect doing something else.

Clients can be very difficult to work with and sometimes it may be necessary to decide to walk away as a Client is just too much hassle.

At my former workplace, we did lots of intermittent business not on a particularly large scale (compared to many other Clients) and I used to get very irritated almost EVERY time a new opportunity came up as at the Client end there would be a new Project Manager for almost each Contract who would decide that they had their own pet question to add to all the other stuff we repeatedly had to complete to demonstrate "competence".

I had already come to accept that this was not a Client who would do an assessment of whether we were competent to do certain types of work and then put us on an "approved list" of suppliers and leave us be for say a year or more and instead would repeat the competency assessment each and every bid. So that was so called Blue Tape enough, but these Project Managers each adding their own thing another level of Blue Tape entirely!

H&S professionals and others talk a lot about supply chain management but it works both ways! "Does Client C want to use Supplier S?" is usually the question, but "Does Supplier S want to work for Client C/" is equally valid.