Building Trust Through Safety: The Story and Substance of SMAS and ISO 45001

The Human Foundation of Health and Safety

Every organisation depends, at its core, on people — their competence, creativity and physical presence. When people are injured, overworked or unprotected, productivity is not the only loss: the organisation’s integrity is compromised.

The moral duty to protect workers is one of the oldest obligations in human law. It lies behind every modern regulation, from the Factories Acts of the nineteenth century to the UK’s Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.

This duty became the seed for modern safety management systems. Over the past decades, occupational safety evolved from compliance with isolated legal requirements into a proactive system of governance, risk, and culture. Out of that evolution came two frameworks that now anchor much of UK safety assurance: ISO 45001, the international management system for occupational health and safety, and SMAS Worksafe, one of the principal UK schemes for supplier pre-qualification and compliance verification.

Both grew from the same moral conviction: that protecting people is not an administrative burden but an ethical necessity, and that systems, when designed well, can make care visible and verifiable.

The Journey to ISO 45001: From Compliance to Culture

The history of ISO 45001 begins with a long period in which safety was treated through national legislation and voluntary standards. In Britain, BS 8800:1996 offered guidance on occupational health and safety management, but it was not certifiable. This led to the creation of OHSAS 18001 in 1999, developed by a consortium of national standards bodies and certification organisations to fill the gap between law and formal system assurance.

OHSAS 18001 became widely used, particularly in construction, manufacturing and logistics, but its structure differed from ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, making integration difficult. As a result, safety management remained partly isolated from quality and environmental management, even though in practice the three were deeply intertwined.

By 2018, the International Organization for Standardization recognised the need for a unified, global framework that could align safety with the broader family of management systems. ISO 45001:2018 was published, replacing OHSAS 18001. It adopted the Annex SL structure, creating compatibility with ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, and introduced new expectations: leadership accountability, worker participation, organisational context, and the integration of occupational health and safety into strategy and culture.

ISO 45001 represents a profound shift in how safety is understood. It moves beyond procedural compliance to examine how organisations create environments in which people can thrive. It asks not only whether hazards are controlled, but whether workers are engaged, heard, and empowered to influence safety decisions.

At its core lies an ethical transformation: the recognition that safety is not the avoidance of injury, but the preservation of dignity. Every clause of ISO 45001 — from leadership commitment to risk control and continual improvement — expresses that moral principle.

What ISO 45001 Requires in Spirit and Practice

An organisation implementing ISO 45001 must first understand its context: the nature of its work, its stakeholders, and the risks and opportunities that influence health and safety. Leadership must then establish a policy that commits not only to compliance but to prevention of injury and ill-health.

Hazard identification becomes a continual process, supported by worker participation. Risk assessment, control measures, and operational planning ensure that activities are designed safely, not simply inspected after the fact. The standard calls for competence, awareness and communication, for emergency preparedness, and for the evaluation of performance through monitoring, internal audits and management review.

Importantly, ISO 45001 defines consultation and participation as obligations. Workers must have real influence over decisions that affect their wellbeing. This provision transforms the system from a top-down enforcement model into a dialogue of shared responsibility.

The cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Act ensures continual improvement. Safety performance is measured not by the absence of accidents alone but by the presence of learning and care. Evidence may include training records, risk assessments, incident investigations, maintenance logs, health surveillance, and data analysis, but what auditors truly look for is culture — the consistency between words and actions.

The Origins and Role of SMAS Worksafe

In parallel with the development of formal ISO standards, the UK construction and facilities-management sectors faced a different challenge: the growing complexity of subcontracting and supply chains. Clients and principal contractors needed assurance that the companies they hired complied with legal and safety obligations. Yet every buyer was running its own pre-qualification questionnaire, leading to duplication and inefficiency.

To address this, a group of major contractors and industry bodies created the Safety Schemes in Procurement (SSIP)forum in 2009, establishing mutual recognition between safety assessment schemes. Among these, SMAS Worksafe(Safety Management Advisory Services) became one of the most trusted.

SMAS Worksafe audits and verifies that contractors and suppliers meet core health and safety standards aligned with the Health and Safety at Work Act, the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, and Construction (Design and Management) Regulations. Its assessments review evidence such as policies, risk assessments, training, insurance, competence certification, and accident records.

Once accredited, a company gains SSIP recognition, meaning its certification is accepted by multiple clients without repeating assessments. This system saves time while maintaining rigour, ensuring that only competent and compliant suppliers are engaged on projects.

Although SMAS is not an ISO standard, it serves a complementary purpose: it converts legal and system requirements into a consistent, evidence-based assurance recognised across industries. In this way, it translates the ethical principles of ISO 45001 into supply-chain accountability.

The Relationship Between SMAS and ISO 45001

The two frameworks operate at different levels but share the same ethical and practical foundation. ISO 45001 establishes the organisation’s internal management system for occupational health and safety. SMAS Worksafe provides external verification that those internal systems meet legal and client expectations.

An organisation certified to ISO 45001 is likely to excel in a SMAS Worksafe assessment because the standard already requires leadership commitment, hazard control, competence, and continual improvement — all of which underpin SSIP criteria. Conversely, achieving SMAS accreditation can serve as a step toward ISO 45001 certification, demonstrating that the organisation already has the essential compliance structure in place.

Together, they create a continuous assurance loop: ISO 45001 governs the internal ethics and processes; SMAS verifies them externally within the supply chain. One builds the system, the other validates its application.

The relationship between them is therefore not bureaucratic but moral: both exist to protect human life, to make accountability visible, and to create a culture where the right thing to do becomes the normal thing to do.

The Ethical Legacy and the Future of Safety Management

Both SMAS and ISO 45001 reveal how far safety has evolved from its industrial origins. Where once compliance meant ticking boxes, today it means caring for people systematically, transparently and intelligently. These frameworks acknowledge that accidents are rarely the result of isolated mistakes but of systemic weakness — unclear communication, inadequate training, or a culture that prizes output over wellbeing.

By formalising leadership accountability and worker participation, ISO 45001 enshrines the idea that safety is shared. By operationalising supplier assurance, SMAS ensures that this shared responsibility extends across the entire value chain. The result is a new form of trust — one built not on inspection alone, but on ethical consistency.

As the global conversation now moves toward psychological health and safety, seen in standards such as ISO 45003, the philosophy behind 45001 and SMAS continues to expand. The modern workplace must protect not only the body but also the mind. Systems of care are becoming systems of culture, where wellbeing and performance reinforce each other.

Ultimately, the legacy of both ISO 45001 and SMAS is to humanise business. They remind us that management systems are not about documents or checklists but about conscience. Their purpose is not only to prevent harm but to affirm the value of every person whose effort sustains the organisation. When implemented with sincerity, they transform safety from obligation into ethos — from compliance into compassion.