Completing Sustainability Verification

Sustainability verification is an extension of the SafeContractor health and safety audit that demonstrates your commitment to best practice and has been built to include the common question sets within PAS91.

The Sustainability verification process will collect information and verify your business against key business sustainability topics. Our technical support team can guide you through the verification process, however, there are steps you can take to help make sure you have all required documents in place and get verified as quickly as possible.

Here are our technical team’s tips for completing the verification process:

1. Upload up-to-date documents at any time and submit them when the questionnaire is released.

Where applicable we will require evidence of certain policy documents in the registered business name e.g. Anti-bribery, GDPR, Environmental, Quality, and Equality.

2. Make sure your contact details are up to date.

We will call you on occasion to ensure that you have received our communication relating to the availability of your Sustainability questionnaire, adhering to relevant SafeContractor packages i.e. Premier, Assisted, Express and Standard.

3. Keep your membership number readily available.

Should you ever need to contact us to discuss Sustainability or require our assistance we will require your SafeContractor membership number to access your account information.

4. Refer to the Guidance Notes available within each section of the Sustainability questionnaire.

Each document outlines what evidence we require if applicable to your business. If something is not applicable to your business e.g. Modern Slavery etc., and you can only answer ‘No’, this will be suitable in order to submit the questionnaire.

5. If you are accredited to BS EN ISO 14001 and BS EN ISO 9001, we can only accept these certificates from a UKAS accredited provider.

If you are certified, you can search accredited organisations to see if your certifying body is UKAS accredited. If your certificate is not UKAS accredited please answer ‘No’ within the questionnaire.

6. We may ask you for evidence of an Environmental Policy or Quality Policy.

We offer templates should you wish to adopt our Environmental or Quality policy within your business and use them as evidence within the Sustainability questionnaire.

7. You are required to select the one organisation description that most closely matches the business and provide relevant financial information.

For start-up businesses, we require a spreadsheet forecasting revenue. Sole traders and partnerships will need to provide relevant pages from the latest tax returns. Small, medium, and large businesses will be required to submit a copy of the most recent full accounts, including turnover and profit for the year.​Abbreviated accounts are not acceptable and Sustainable verification cannot be verified without full accounts.

8. We will ask for details of two referees from recent projects including the name of the project; type of work; the value of the project; date of project and contact name/ telephone number/email address.

It is not mandatory to provide referee information. However, we advise that not providing references could potentially hamper your position in the tender process. Please ensure that you have already received consent from referees when using their personal data within the Sustainability questionnaire. If you do not wish to provide any referee details, you can enter N/A or TBC within each Reference field in order to submit the Sustainability Questionnaire.

9. Sustainability verification can only be verified and remain valid if you are SafeContractor health and safety accredited.

When your health and safety audit has been passed by one of our SafeContractor auditors we will then issue a Sustainability certificate, once your Sustainability questionnaire has also been verified, alongside your health and safety certificate with matching expiry dates.

Achieving your Sustainability badge enables you to access more sustainable work opportunities with clients that share your values. Following the verification process, contractors are showcased to hundreds of SafeContractor client organisations on our contractor management portal as Gold, Silver, or Bronze.