The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) is launching an initiative to reduce health and safety red tape that can hinder small and medium-sized businesses winning lucrative contracts.
Many small businesses face unnecessary problems securing contracts because of the wide variety of schemes being used by clients or training providers wanting proof they can meet health and safety standards.
Public sector contracts are particularly onerous and small companies are rarely able to compete with larger organisations that can afford to devote full-time members of staff to such applications.
Following a report from its National Occupational Safety and Health Committee, RoSPA is calling for a more uniform approach that would mean less paperwork, more efficiency and better help for companies which need to raise standards.
"The multitude of assessment, compliance and pre-qualification schemes means businesses that are applying for contracts have to be repeatedly filling in forms to meet the different requirements of each scheme," said Roger Bibbings, RoSPA occupational safety adviser.
"Many of the schemes are of high quality, but few involve any mutual recognition. Some don't even realise that others exist. That means duplication of effort and wasted resources when businesses could be using time more profitably."
The committee's steering group - chaired by Paul Reeve, Health, Safety and Environment Adviser to the Electrical Contractors Association - is carrying out an 18-month inquiry into ways of small firms, with the aim of reducing the amount of bureaucracy involved in contract pre-qualification.
The charity will consider how to introduce common criteria for the schemes, allowing them to become more interchangeable so that competence that has been proved under one system will also be recognised by a business using another.
"Hundreds of thousands of businesses have to submit to scrutiny by these schemes which can bring real added health and safety value if we can get the approach right," added Bibbings.