Getting on a main contractor's
approved list.

Applying is a form and an evidence pack: accreditation, insurance, financial standing, health and safety records, references and a trade capability statement. What decides it is whether the pack is complete and current on the day it is reviewed. What keeps you on afterwards is performance, and nobody will tell you when you come off.

Why the list matters more than the tender

Most subcontract work at any scale is not won in open competition. It is won by being on a list and then being invited to price, which means the commercially significant event happens long before any tender arrives.

That reframes the effort. A firm spending its energy on pricing better is competing for the invitations it already gets. A firm getting onto three more supply chains has changed how many invitations exist. For a business that feels like the market has gone quiet, the second is nearly always the more useful question.

What the application actually needs

The form varies. The pack behind it is remarkably consistent, and preparing it once for all applications is worth a morning.

1. Accreditation. An SSIP member scheme certificate for health and safety, and increasingly certification against the Common Assessment Standard, which replaced PAS 91 when BSI withdrew it in 2023. Which you need depends on who you are applying to, and the acronyms are mapped in SSIP, CHAS, Constructionline and what replaced PAS 91.
2. Insurance schedules. Public liability, employers' liability, and often professional indemnity if you carry any design responsibility. The limits of indemnity are checked against their thresholds, not against what feels reasonable to you.
3. Financial standing. Filed accounts, and frequently a credit reference. A firm with late filings or a weak balance sheet may be capped rather than refused, meaning approved up to a package value.
4. Health and safety records. Policy, accident and RIDDOR history, sample RAMS, and evidence of training and competence.
5. Trade references. Usually two or three, and they are contacted.
6. A capability statement. What you do, at what scale, with what resource. The part most firms write badly, covered below.

What they are actually checking

Worth understanding, because it changes what you emphasise. A supply chain team is not primarily assessing whether you are good. It is assessing whether you are a risk to their programme, their compliance position and their client relationship.

Which means three questions sit behind the form. Can this firm resource the packages we would give them, or will they take one and then not turn up. Will they pass an audit if our client or the HSE looks at their work on our site. And are they financially likely to be here at the end of the job, because a subcontractor failing mid-package is one of the most expensive events a main contractor deals with.

Every document in the pack maps to one of those three. Answering them directly, rather than describing your quality of workmanship, is what separates a strong application from a complete one.

The capability statement

The one genuinely free-form part and the one most firms waste.

What is not useful: adjectives, a history of the company, and a claim to be reliable. Every applicant says all three and the reader has stopped seeing them.

What is useful is specific and checkable. The trades you self-deliver against those you subcontract. Your typical and maximum package value. How many operatives you can put on site and how many gangs that is. Named sectors you have actually worked in. Geographic range you will genuinely travel. And any accreditation or capability that is unusual for your trade, which is the thing most likely to make somebody remember you.

Nobody has ever been added to a supply chain for saying they take pride in their work. Being the only applicant who can put four gangs into a live retail environment is a different matter.

How firms come off the list

This is the part nothing else covers, and it matters more than the application.

Removal is almost never announced. There is no letter. You simply stop being invited to price, and because enquiries are irregular anyway, a firm can take six months to notice and will usually attribute it to the market.

Four causes, in rough order of frequency.

• Expired documents. Insurance lapses, accreditation is not renewed, and the supply chain system flags you as non-compliant. Nobody chases it and you drop out of the pool. It is the commonest cause and it is entirely preventable, which is the subject of the certificates that expire without anybody noticing.
• Not pricing. Declining or ignoring three or four enquiries in a row, usually because you were busy. Supply chain teams reasonably stop asking, and getting back into the rotation is harder than staying in it. Price something, even if you price it high.
• A performance event. A delayed package, an unsafe act, a defect that came back. Recoverable if you deal with it directly and visibly; not recoverable if you argue.
• The contact left. Sometimes it is nothing more than the person who knew you moving on, and nobody at the other end knowing why you were on the list.

The countermeasure to all four is the same and takes very little: a diarised check every six months on each supply chain you care about, confirming your documents are current on their system and asking whether anything is coming up. That call also fixes the fourth cause by creating a new contact.

Where to start, on Monday

Build the pack once. One folder containing current accreditation, insurance schedules, filed accounts, health and safety policy, two sample RAMS, references and a one-page capability statement. Every future application becomes an hour instead of a week, and the reason firms do not apply to more supply chains is almost always that assembling the pack feels like a project.

Then make the call you have been putting off. Ring the supply chain contact at the main contractor you used to work for and have not heard from, and ask two questions: are our documents current on your system, and is there anything coming up we should be pricing. That call costs nothing and it is the single highest-return thing on this page.