Like many small and large business, Primary Tree Surgeons is CHAS accredited and has been for the last 4 years.
CHAS is the Contractors Health and Safety Assessment Scheme. It exists to help businesses ensure that they comply with Health and Safety legislation.
There are many different pieces of legislation that cover the work that we do, covering, amongst other things, risk assessment, working at height, using climbing and powered equipment, environment and ecology, using substances hazardous to health, manual handling, noise and vibration first aid, reporting accidents…phew, the list is long!
It’s that time of year again for us to pull together the evidence of our health and safety practice to send off to an H&S qualified, external assessor to see that we are putting H&S clearly at the forefront of our practice.
Health and Safety legislation sometimes feels like finding your way through a maze and the level of bureaucracy and detail is often what puts people off. Some of the common sense that it requires also gets lost in the industry that has grown up around H&S.
But for us, CHAS is about much more than compliance.
We may not always get it right but we do put a premium on our safety and that of customers and anyone else impacted by our work.
We think that going through the process of re-accreditation every year gives us three important things:
- It encourages us to focus on H&S every day, doing the best we can to practice tree surgery as safely as possible
- It gives us a reason to talk about H&S regularly at our quarterly team meetings and help keep everyone on the team focused on every day safe practice; to learn from each other and from what goes well as what goes wrong
- It gives us a structure to think about how we do what we do, and as a result of that focus we have changed many, many aspects of our operational practice over the years. For example, daily written site specific risk assessments are a core part of what we do; regular six-monthly checks of all of our climbing equipment meant finding a reliable, qualified and accredited partner to complete that work for us; written method statements on the riskiest jobs help us focus on the risks so that we avoid harm
What does it offer our customers?
It’s the difference between choosing accompany that demonstrates care about safe practice and one that doesn’t. That involves looking after our team, being insured, investing in good training and quality equipment, and thinking about the impact we could have on anyone affected by what we do.Call Andrew on 07771 883061, 01256 817369 or email him at Andrew@primarytreesurgeons.co.uk for a detailed, written quotation.