How to Check a Contractor's Insurance and Accreditation

Seven checks that separate a real contractor from a risk

Work through these in order. Each one is quick, and any contractor worth hiring will hand the evidence over without hesitation - reluctance or delay is itself a useful answer.

1. Confirm the business is real and registered. Search the company name at Companies House and check it is active, that the registered address matches the one on their quote, and how long it has traded. A limited company with a filing history is easy to trace; a name that does not appear anywhere should prompt questions before anything else.
2. Ask for both insurance certificates in writing. You want to see Employers' Liability and Public Liability cover. Employers' Liability is a legal requirement for almost every business with staff under the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969, with a minimum of £5 million cover, and the certificate must be displayed or produced on request.
3. Check the Public Liability limit is adequate. For work inside a live commercial kitchen, £5 million is a common floor and £10 million is often expected on larger or higher-risk sites. Read the limit, not just the fact that a policy exists, and make sure it is proportionate to the value of the building and the disruption a mistake could cause.
4. Verify the policy is in date and covers this exact work. Look at the start and expiry dates, then read the business description or activities listed on the schedule. A policy written for general office cleaning may not respond to hot works, working at height or grease extract cleaning, so the wording needs to name the type of work being done on your premises.
5. Confirm SSIP accreditation independently. Schemes such as CHAS, SafeContractor, SMAS and Constructionline sit under the SSIP (Safety Schemes in Procurement) umbrella. Do not rely on a logo on the website - ask for the membership number and check it on the scheme's own online directory or the SSIP portal, remembering that most accreditations run for twelve months and must be renewed annually.
6. Check the technicians are competent, not just the company. For kitchen extract cleaning the recognised benchmark is BESA's TR19® Grease specification, which sets minimum competency levels and expects the person signing off the work to hold a qualification such as the BESA Grease Hygiene Technician (GHT) award. Ask who will actually attend and what they are qualified to do.
7. Ask to see a sample post-clean report. A compliant contractor produces a written report with before-and-after photographs, grease-thickness readings measured in microns, system schematics and a note of any areas that could not be reached. If they cannot show you what their evidence looks like, they cannot give your insurer what it will ask for after an incident.

Reading between the lines of a certificate

A certificate is only as good as the detail on it, and the most common problems are not forgeries - they are honest documents that simply do not cover the situation. The three things that catch people out are dates, limits and scope. A policy that lapsed last month is worthless today; a £1 million limit looks reassuring until you consider what a serious kitchen fire in a multi-tenant building could cost; and a schedule that describes the business as “general cleaning” may exclude the very extract and duct work you are paying for. Always cross-read all three against the job in front of you.

It is also worth understanding why the standards exist. TR19® Grease is not law, but it is treated as the benchmark by insurers, fire and rescue services and environmental health officers, and it is written to satisfy the duty every “responsible person” carries under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. When a contractor works to that specification and documents grease deposits properly, they are producing the exact evidence your insurer expects to see if it ever has to pay out. When they do not, a claim can be challenged - and the shortfall lands on you, not on them.

Accreditation deserves the same scepticism as insurance. SSIP membership is a genuinely useful signal because it means an independent scheme has assessed the contractor's health and safety arrangements against common core criteria, and it saves you repeating that assessment yourself. But it lapses. Because most memberships are valid for only twelve months, a badge that was earned two years ago tells you nothing about today, which is why checking the live directory entry - rather than a screenshot or a PDF - is the step that actually protects you. The same discipline applies to insurance and to individual qualifications: verify at source, and verify that it is current.

None of this is about distrust for its own sake. The best contractors keep this evidence tidy and hand it over gladly, because compliance is how they win work from careful clients. The purpose of checking is simply to make sure the firm you are trusting with fire safety is the firm the paperwork describes - and that the cover you are relying on will still be there when it counts.