Checking a Health and Safety Consultant: 5 Things You Can Verify Yourself

Three proposals arrive. All three cite qualifications, memberships and years of experience. None of those claims is checkable from the document itself, and nobody buying professional services wants to begin a relationship by asking for proof.

You do not have to ask awkwardly. Five of the things that matter sit in public records or on a certificate the firm will hand over without hesitation, and you can check them in about fifteen minutes. The remaining ones cannot be verified at all and have to be tested instead, which is a different exercise and worth separating out.

This is not a guide to choosing a consultant. It is the shorter, duller task that comes before it: establishing that the people in front of you are who the proposal says they are.

Why it is worth doing at all

Because the duty is yours and stays yours. Regulation 7 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires an employer to appoint one or more competent persons to assist in complying with its obligations. Appointing somebody who turns out not to be competent does not transfer the problem to them. It leaves you with an unmet duty and a contract.

The HSE takes the position that choosing a consultant is the employer's decision, and publishes guidance on getting help with health and safety. It does not vouch for individuals or operate a licensing scheme, which is precisely why the checks below are worth making yourself.

1. Professional body membership and grade

Membership can be confirmed with the body rather than taken from a letterhead, and the grade matters more than the fact of membership. Professional institutions operate tiered grades reflecting qualification and experience, and the difference between an entry grade and a senior one is substantial. IOSH publishes its membership structure, so you can read what each grade actually requires before deciding whether the grade claimed is the grade you need.

The useful question is not whether somebody is a member but whether their grade corresponds to the complexity of the work you are buying.

2. The qualification itself

Qualifications are awarded by named bodies and can be checked with them. NEBOSH is the most commonly cited awarding organisation in the UK, and regulated qualifications and their levels appear on the government's register of regulated qualifications, where you can confirm that a named award exists at the level claimed.

The level is the part to read carefully, because certificate-level and diploma-level awards are different instruments doing different jobs. A certificate is appropriate for a great deal of practical work. Where you are buying judgement on a complex estate, a multi-country group or an unusual risk, the higher level is the relevant one, and the distinction is public information rather than something you need to negotiate.

3. Any certification the firm claims

Firms cite management system certification in proposals, and unlike a self-declared competency a certificate is traceable. Certification is issued by a certification body, and the credible ones are themselves accredited, in the UK by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service. Its directory of accredited organisations lets you confirm that the body named on a certificate is accredited for what it certified.

Then check the certificate itself: the certified entity, the scope, the standard, and the expiry date. A certificate covering one subsidiary, or a scope that does not include the service you are buying, is a common and entirely legitimate thing that proposals nonetheless present as a whole-firm credential.

4. Professional indemnity insurance

Ask for the certificate rather than the assurance, and read two fields: the limit of indemnity and whether the cover is on an each-claim or aggregate basis.

This is worth a minute of attention because the figure needs to bear some relationship to the exposure you are asking the consultant to advise on. A limit that looks generous against the fee can look thin against a remediation programme on a large estate, and aggregate cover shared across a whole client book behaves differently from cover available per claim.

5. The entity and the named individual

The last check is the one people skip, and it answers a question the proposal often leaves vague: who exactly are you contracting with, and who will actually do the work.

Companies House will tell you the legal entity, its filing history, how long it has traded and who the officers are. Compare that against the proposal. A long-established consultancy name fronting a recently incorporated entity, or a proposal signed by somebody who does not appear anywhere in the corporate record, is not necessarily a problem, but it is a question worth asking before contract rather than after.

Then insist that the named consultant appears in the contract rather than the firm. The person who writes the proposal is frequently not the person who arrives, and naming them is the only way to fix that.

The four things you cannot verify

Separating these out matters, because trying to verify them wastes time and failing to test them is how engagements disappoint.

Sector relevance. No register records whether somebody has worked in professional services, education or data centres as opposed to heavy industry. Test it by asking what they would expect to find in your type of building and listening to whether the answer is specific. A consultant who talks about plant rooms, server rooms and boardroom rigging in an office context has been in one.

Independence. Where a firm both audits and remediates, there is a commercial interest in the findings. That is not disqualifying, and many buyers reasonably prefer continuity, but the position should be declared rather than discovered. Ask whether the audit fee depends on any follow-on work. Our note on comparing audit companies covers the trade-off.

Who turns up, every time. Verifiable for the first visit through the contract, not verifiable for the twelfth. Ask how continuity is handled when the named person is unavailable, and whether consultants are employed or subcontracted, because the answer determines whether continuity is a policy or a hope.

Multi-country delivery. The claim most often made and least often examined. A firm that says it covers fifty countries is doing one of three things: flying someone from the UK, subcontracting to local firms it has never met, or working with locally qualified practitioners it has an ongoing relationship with. Only the third reliably produces a document that satisfies the local test, and the only way to find out is to ask who signs the French assessment and what qualification they hold there.

The fifteen-minute check

Check	Where	What you are looking for
Membership grade	The professional body	A grade proportionate to the work, not just membership
Qualification and level	Awarding body and the regulated qualifications register	The named award, at the level claimed
Certification claims	The certification body and the accreditation directory	Certified entity, scope, standard, expiry
Professional indemnity	Certificate from the firm	Limit, and each-claim versus aggregate
Entity and individual	Companies House and the contract	Who you contract with, and who is named to attend

Five checks, four of them independent of the seller and the fifth a document any firm will hand over. If any of them does not reconcile with the proposal, the question to ask is a factual one rather than an accusation, and the answer is usually mundane. Occasionally it is not.

The check that matters most for international groups

If your footprint is in more than one country, one additional question outranks all five above, and no register answers it.

The instrument differs by country. France requires a document unique in a prescribed form. Germany requires a documented assessment within its own framework and, for certain installations, inspection by an approved body rather than a contractor of your choosing. The Netherlands requires a risk inventory that, above defined thresholds, must be tested by an externally certified expert. Italy requires a named appointment. A UK qualification, however senior, does not confer standing in any of them.

So the real question for a group is not what the UK consultant holds, but how the local document gets produced and by whom. Genuine global health and safety consultants will name the arrangement without hesitating. Where the answer is vague, the likely outcome is a translated UK assessment, which is the single most common finding in the multi-country work we pick up.

How to make the checks stick afterwards

Verification at appointment is worth little if nothing records it. Keep the membership evidence, the insurance certificate, any certification scope and the named consultant with their renewal dates somewhere other than the procurement folder, because a certificate that lapsed in year two is the same problem as one that never existed.

That is one small part of why health and safety consultants and software belong together: the system that holds your assessments, inspection dates and actions is the natural place to hold the credentials of the people producing them. Periodic health and safety audits then have a second, quieter function, which is confirming that the arrangements are still being delivered by the people you appointed.

Where Arinite fits

Arinite employs its consultants rather than subcontracting them, which is the answer to the third of the four unverifiable questions above, and we work with locally qualified practitioners in each jurisdiction rather than translating a UK document, which is the answer to the fourth. We support 1,500+ businesses in 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years.

Our health and safety consultants work across offices, legal, insurance and education clients, through either a retained partnership or an outsourced arrangement depending on how much you want to keep in house. For multi-country groups, our international health and safety consultants can tell you which countries your current arrangement does not actually cover.

Run the five checks on whoever you are considering, including us. Then book a free gap analysis and judge the advice rather than the credentials.

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