How councils appoint building contractors in Lancashire

Council-funded building work reaches a builder by two very different routes, and they get mixed up all the time. The difference matters, because in one of them you choose the contractor and in the other you do not.

Route one: the money goes to you, and you choose

This is how most grant-funded work in a private home happens, including the Disabled Facilities Grant. The grant is awarded to the householder, not to a builder. Once it is approved, it is the householder who appoints the firm that does the work.

Most councils keep a list of contractors they know and have worked with, and they will usually suggest from it. That is genuinely helpful, and it is worth looking at. But it is an advisory list, not a closed one. In most cases you are not obliged to use it.

If you want to bring in your own builder, the council will normally accept the quote so long as the firm is properly insured and qualified, the price is reasonable, and the work meets the technical standards. The quote has to be priced against the schedule of works the case officer has drawn up, so everybody is pricing the same job. Expect a due diligence check on the firm as part of that.

The practical point is this: if you have a grant approved and there is a builder you trust, or one who has worked on your house before, it is usually worth asking rather than assuming you have to pick from a list.

Route two: the council is the customer

The other route is the council buying building work directly, for its own buildings or its own housing. Planned maintenance, empty properties being brought back into use, schools, community buildings, larger programmes of work.

This is procurement, and it works differently. Contractors are usually appointed through frameworks or term contracts, and getting onto one means going through prequalification first, before anybody looks at a price.

What prequalification involves

The framework most of this now runs on is the Common Assessment Standard, developed by Build UK, which replaced the older PAS 91. It is a single set of questions covering health and safety, insurance, financial standing, company information and a range of policy areas, so a contractor answers them once rather than for every buyer.

Several schemes assess against it, and there is mutual recognition between them, so a pass with one should count with another. Alongside that, government guidance directs public buyers to accept SSIP member scheme accreditation as evidence of the health and safety part. In practice that means a contractor who has done the work once should not have to keep repeating it.

• Health and safety, assessed to a recognised standard
• Insurance cover, verified rather than declared
• Financial standing of the business
• Company information and registration
• Policies covering the way the business operates

If you are the one appointing

Whether you are a housing officer, a managing agent or somebody responsible for a building on behalf of an organisation, the checks worth making are much the same:

• Is the firm assessed by a recognised health and safety scheme, and is it current
• Are the insurance levels right for the value and type of work
• Have they done this particular kind of job before, and can you see one
• Will they price against your schedule of works rather than their own version of it
• Can they give you the documentation quickly, or does it take three weeks to appear

That last one tells you more than people expect. A firm that has its paperwork in order sends it the same day. A firm that has to go and put it together is telling you something about how the job will run.

The short version

If the grant is yours, the choice of builder is usually yours too, within sensible checks. If the council is the customer, the route runs through prequalification and frameworks, and it is a longer road.

We work across Wyre, Fylde, Preston, Lancaster and the wider North West, and we are CHAS accredited, insured and happy to send our documentation over the same day it is asked for. If you are pricing a job and need our paperwork before you can put us forward, just ask.