02 Mar Health & Safety, PQQ Compliance and Top Tips
By Beckie Staincliffe
March 2nd 2016
Trying to win that all important bid? In our experience, all too often, organisations are losing bids due to incomplete or poorly answered health and safety sections of their submission.
Our Associate Beckie Staincliffe at European Health & Safety Consultants (EHSC Ltd) sets out below a Short Checklist on how to ensure your Health & Safety section doesn’t let you down:
- ALWAYS provide evidence (especially if it specifically asks for it in the question) eg a completed monitoring form.
- Provide a recent Action Plan (with relevant annotations of progress or barriers to progress).
- Ensure incident information is supplied when requested. (You won’t be assessed on the incident itself but the assessor is looking for you to show that you take the necessary steps when an incident occurs ie prevention of recurrence, review of risk assessments etc.)
- Present valid and suitable risk assessments or method statements. (ALL assessments that we have marked, or helped complete, require these to be provided and in particular they must be relevant to the works that you are tendering for eg if you are bidding for gas works then a risk assessment for use of fork lift trucks may not be appropriate.)
- Provide your FULL Policies and Procedures document and ALL Appendices. (The Appendices help the Assessor to view blank forms that are available.)
- Answer all questions and ask someone else to check through the responses you have provided.
- Check you have not referred to old legislation or bodies etc eg reference to Corgi instead of Gas Safe.
- If you have had a Prohibition Notice, Improvement Notice or have a health and safety case pending – Don’t panic! Include summary information, reports and evidence. You will not be marked down if you have provided evidence that you have learnt from the experience and improved upon your systems/culture etc as necessary.
- Provide a copy of your H&S Competence, if this is externally sourced include your Contract with your Consultant (This shows the Assessor the support you have available to you.) You may also wish to provide CVs as additional evidence.
