Standardising contractor vetting across a national supply chain
How McCarthy & Stone reduced duplication, improved onboarding speed and achieved contractor compliance rates of up to 80%
Background
As the UK’s leading developer and manager of retirement communities, McCarthy & Stone oversees the full property lifecycle – from land acquisition and design through to construction and long-term building management.
Their supply chain includes national contractors, regional SMEs and specialist providers across construction, fire safety and lifts. Because they both build and manage properties over the long term, they need confidence that every contractor meets the same standards, regardless of project or location.
McCarthy & Stone has worked with Veriforce CHAS for more than four years to address this challenge and bring greater structure to contractor compliance across the business.
The Challenge
Managing contractor compliance across a large, geographically distributed business was becoming increasingly difficult to control and monitor.
Different regions and teams were working in different ways. Contractors could be vetted multiple times, depending on where they were working, and records were often held locally in spreadsheets rather than being shared across the business.
As Brian Holcroft, Director of Health, Safety and Environment, explains:
We were so inconsistent in the way we were vetting our contractors; we have offices across the country who all had their own methods.
This created several practical issues:
- The same contractor could be assessed more than once by different teams
- There was no easy way to see which contractors met the required standard across the business
- Finding and verifying compliance records took time and effort
- Teams were spending significant time on admin rather than assurance
I think it’s fair to say that contractor management was an area we struggled in. Trying to find records was difficult, we were duplicating things. Sometimes we might even have more than one person vetting the same contractor, particularly if they worked across regions.
At the same time, construction timelines meant contractors sometimes needed to be onboarded quickly, increasing the risk of inconsistent checks:
Sometimes you just need to get a contractor on site – maybe we weren’t being as diligent as we could be.
McCarthy & Stone needed a way to:
- Apply the same vetting standard across the business
- Avoid repeating the same checks for the same contractor
- Make contractor compliance status visible and easy to access
- Reduce admin without lowering standards
The Solution
McCarthy & Stone introduced CHAS as a single, business-wide standard for contractor vetting and approval.
Rather than each team carrying out its own checks, all contractors are now required to hold CHAS certification. CHAS Advanced is required as a baseline for contractors, while principal contractors must achieve CHAS Elite, which is the most comprehensive assessment and incorporates the Common Assessment Standard (CAS), providing a higher level of assurance for those leading work on site.
This shift replaced spreadsheet-based tracking with a shared, reliable source of contractor data and created a clear, consistent approach across the business.
This created a clear and consistent baseline:
- All contractors are assessed against a recognised external standard
- Once approved through CHAS, contractors are recognised across the business
- Teams no longer run their own parallel vetting processes
We chose CHAS because we already knew them. They had strong credibility within the industry and could scale with us.
The teams at McCarthy & Stone can now:
- Access up to date contractor compliance information 24/7
- See whether they meet the required level before onboarding
- Use the same compliance criteria across every project and location
As Brian explains:
CHAS has given us a single way of vetting contractors across the business. We’re no longer duplicating assurance work, and we can clearly see who is compliant and who isn’t, without having to piece that together manually.
McCarthy & Stone
The Impact
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