LADS is now SafeContractor approved

We are pleased to confirm that LADS has been assessed and approved under the SafeContractor scheme.

For anyone who has never had to fill one of these assessments in, it is worth explaining what it actually involves — because "accredited" is a word that gets used loosely, and this one has some weight behind it.

What SafeContractor actually checks

SafeContractor is an independent third-party health and safety accreditation, audited to UKAS standards. It is not a badge you buy. An assessor works through the way a business really operates and asks for evidence at every step:

• Health and safety policy — is there one, is it current, and does it reflect the work the company actually does rather than a template downloaded from somewhere?
• Risk assessments and method statements — are RAMS produced for jobs, are they site-specific, and do they deal with the real hazards? For us that means working at height, ground bearing and outrigger loading, exclusion zones, overhead services, rescue arrangements, hot surfaces and pressurised systems.
• Insurance — is public liability cover in place and current?
• Training and competence — are operators trained for the machines they are using, and is that training recorded and in date?
• Accident and incident reporting — is there a process, and is it used?

Only when all of that stacks up does the approval come through.

Why it matters if you are the one appointing us

If you are a facilities manager, a managing agent, an estate agent or a surveyor, you carry a duty to check that the contractors you bring onto a site are competent. That check takes time, and doing it properly for every new supplier is a real administrative burden.

An independent accreditation shortens that. It means someone with no commercial interest in the outcome has already looked at our paperwork and our practice and found them sound. It also means the documentation you need for a permit — RAMS, insurance certificates, operator qualifications — exists in a form we can send you before we arrive, rather than something we scramble to produce on the day.

For domestic customers the value is simpler. It is a signal that the people putting a twenty-metre platform up outside your bedroom window take that seriously.

Where it fits with everything else

Accreditation is not the whole story. Our powered access work follows IPAF-aligned practice with trained operators, we hold public liability insurance, and we produce a site-specific risk assessment and method statement for every job — not just the large ones.

The dry steam, the drones and the lifts all get a lot of attention because they are the visible part of what we do. The unglamorous part is the planning that happens before any of it arrives on site: checking ground conditions, agreeing exclusion zones, identifying overhead cables, deciding how someone comes down if something goes wrong.

As the owner put it when the approval came through:

Safety isn't an afterthought for us—it's the foundation of how we operate every single day.

That is the point of going through an audit like this. Not to add a logo to the website, but to have somebody independent confirm that what we say about how we work is actually how we work.

If you need our documentation for a site permit or a supplier onboarding process, call us on 0330 043 0961 or email the office and we will send it straight over.