Founded in 2009, Safety Schemes in Procurement (SSIP) is an umbrella organisation that facilitates mutual recognition between health & safety prequalification schemes.
What it means is that all members of SSIP recognise each other’s health & safety assessments, so you should only ever have to be passed by one SSIP member for basic health & safety compliance, to be accepted by them all. SSIP is a governing body created to reduce health and safety assessment costs in the supply chain.
Supported by the HSE, SSIP aims to streamline prequalification and encourage straightforward mutual recognition between its Member Schemes and highlight the savings to buyers and suppliers.
In order to give you a better understanding of SSIP, and how it can benefit you, we’ve answered some of the questions we’re frequently asked by suppliers and clients…
Currently in excess of 57,000 suppliers are registered with an SSIP Member Scheme. SSIP also has many registered members including Altius of course!
The basis of SSIP mutual recognition is an assessment against the requirements of the SSIP’s ‘Core Criteria’, or the Health & Safety module of PAS91. Once you’ve successfully passed an assessment of your compliance with these regulations, you’ll be listed under one or more of the following categories, whichever apply to you: Contractor, Designer, Principal Contractor, Principal Designer.
How mutual recognition works does vary but, as an example, if you’ve passed your CDM assessment through Altius, CHAS will recognise this by offering their certification for a significantly reduced fee and with no requirement to undertake their assessment.
To find out more, check out the SSIP website. If you have been assessed by a member of SSIP in the last year, please call and let us know; you may eligible for a discount.
How you can use the SSIP arrangements to your benefit depends on your current situation, which schemes you need or want to be a member of, and a weighing up of the pros and cons of the different scenarios. For example, if you’ve passed your Altius CDM Award, you’ll appear on our SSIP list.
If you then need to join any of the other SSIP member schemes, you can use your Altius CDM status to do so. Just make them aware of your Altius status when you enquire about joining (or renewing) and they’ll let you know what you need to do.
If you have passed your Altius CDM Award, we will make sure you appear on the SSIP Portal, which is a web based tool used by a large (and growing) number of public and private sector clients to verify the pre-qualification status of contractors under CDM 2015 requirements.
Altius’ CDMComply assessment falls under the approved SSIP accreditation, so once a supplier has gained certification under this Altius assessment they will automatically be entered into the SSIP Portal database.
Altius also boasts the quickest turnaround and best overall value certificationto get onto the SSIP Portal with CDMComply. In addition to this, Altius will also grant free CDMComply certification and SSIP Portal entry to any supplier who meets all the SSIP Core Criteria as part of any other Altius client-specific assessment process.
