QHSE Gap Analysis and Compliance Health Check
A scored assessment of where your business actually stands - across health & safety, quality and environmental - with the legal duties separated from the nice-to-haves.
Why we don’t do free audits
Because free audits aren't audits. They're sales calls with a clipboard.
Someone walks your site for an hour, lists what's wrong, and hands you a proposal. You get a sales document, not a diagnosis - and the findings are shaped by what the person wants to sell you next.
A proper diagnostic takes days, not an hour, and produces something you can hand to your board, your insurer or a customer running due diligence on you. Nobody gives that away. Anyone offering to is either doing something much smaller than they're implying, or building the cost into whatever comes after.
There's a practical filter in it too, and it points both ways. Paying for the diagnostic means you intend to do something with what it finds.
Charging for it means we can tell you what's actually there — including the parts that lead nowhere near a retainer.
Better we both know in week one than in month six.
The two scores
Most audits give you one score. One score can't tell you the difference between a business that's breaking the law and a business that's simply not world-class - and those need completely different responses.
We score every question twice over: once for legal compliance, once for best practice. Of the 135 questions, 91 test statutory duties and 44 test maturity beyond the legal minimum.
These questions test what the law requires: the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, the Management Regulations 1999 and supporting regulations; the Environmental Protection Act 1990, environmental permitting and waste duty of care; and product safety, conformity marking and consumer protection on the quality side.
A low score here is exposure, not an improvement opportunity. These are things that are already true about your business whether or not anyone has looked. Your overall risk rating is driven by this score alone — nothing you do on best practice moves it.
These questions measure maturity beyond the legal minimum — a structured risk register, management of change, leading indicators rather than lagging ones, behavioural safety, integrated systems.
A low score here is not a breach. It's a roadmap. It tells you where the business could be stronger, and it's the part you schedule over quarters rather than fix in a fortnight.
Separating the two is the whole point. It means the board gets a straight answer to the question they're actually asking - are we in trouble, or are we just not as good as we'd like to be? - and it means the action plan is ordered by legal risk rather than by whatever was easiest to write down.
What gets assessed.
Health and Safety
12 sections- Leadership and governance
- Incident management
- Risk management
- First aid and emergency
- Fire safety
- PPE and welfare
- Work equipment and machinery
- Contractors and visitors
- COSHH and occupational health
- Workplace transport
- Training and information
- Premises and building safety
Bold sections carry the heaviest weightings.
Quality
4 sections- Quality management and customer focus
- Product conformity and safety
- Process control and calibration
- Supplier and subcontract control
Environmental
4 sections- Environmental management and legal register
- Waste management
- Emissions, energy and resources
- Pollution prevention
Taken on its own, without Module 1, quality and environmental is £1,400 — it carries its own document request, mobilisation, report and debrief.
The legal-compliance questions from Module 1, scored on the same scale and directly comparable year on year. It tells you whether you are compliant. It does not tell you how to get better — that is what the second score and the prioritised action plan in Module 1 are for.
Included annually with an Anchor retainer. All prices exclude VAT.
Each discipline is scored separately as well as combined, so the report names a priority discipline - whichever one carries the lowest legal compliance score. Most manufacturers assume it'll be health and safety. It frequently isn't.
How we score it
Every question is scored from 0 to 5 against a fixed scale, so two different assessors looking at the same evidence land in the same place. Where something genuinely doesn't apply to your site - no marked product, no trade effluent, no F-gas equipment - it's marked not applicable and removed from both your score and the maximum, so it neither penalises you nor flatters you.
Every question — scored 0 to 5
0
No evidence
1
Major gaps, reactive only
2
Basic, inconsistent
3
Legally compliant
4
Proactive, embedded
5
Leading practice
Note where “legally compliant” sits — 3 out of 5. Compliance is the middle of the scale, not the top. That surprises people, and it's the honest way round.
Your overall score — five bands
0–50%
High risk
51–70%
Reactive
71–85%
Stable
86–95%
Proactive
96–100%
Mature
Where a question genuinely doesn't apply to your site, it's removed from both your score and the maximum — so it neither penalises you nor flatters you.
Anything scoring 0, 1 or 2 goes straight onto the action plan. That's the rule, applied consistently, so the register is built by the scoring rather than by judgement on the day.
How it runs
Before we arrive
Discover
The document request goes out 5 to 10 working days ahead. We review what comes back before we arrive, so day one starts with questions rather than filing.
On site · 2 or 5 days
Diagnose
Two days for health and safety, five for all three disciplines. Document review, a full walk of the operation, and conversations with supervisors and operators — not just the management team. Every question is scored against evidence, with what we actually saw recorded next to it.
After the site days
Design
Findings prioritised by legal risk first, then by impact. Everything scoring 0 to 2 becomes an action with a recommended fix, a priority and a suggested owner.
Within 5 working days
Deliver
The scored report and the action plan land within five working days of the last site day, followed by an hour walking your leadership team through it.
Before we arrive
Before we arrive
A 51-item document request, sent 5 to 10 working days before we turn up.
- 30 health and safety
- 9 quality
- 12 environmental
Policies, risk assessments, LOLER and PUWER records, COSHH inventories, fire and emergency documentation, calibration registers, waste transfer notes, permits and legal registers.
You send back what you have. What you can't find is itself a finding — and a useful one, because “we're sure it exists somewhere” is exactly the position that falls apart during an enforcement visit or an insurance claim.
Nothing is a test. The list exists so we spend the site days looking at your operation rather than hunting through folders.
What it costs
Module 1
Health & Safety
£900
2 days on site
What it answers
Whether you're in trouble. 61 of the 77 questions test statutory duties.
Module 2
Quality & Environmental
+£900
3 more days
What it answers
How to get better. Quality is the one discipline where best-practice questions outnumber legal ones.
Both together
£1,800
Five days on site · 20 sections · 135 questions
Fixed, agreed before we start, not revised afterwards. That covers the document review, the site time, the scored report, the action plan and the debrief. No day rates, no expenses on top.
The three extra days are charged at a lower rate than the first two, because we're already on site and the mobilisation is already paid for.
We look at all three because they overlap far more than most firms expect. One non-conformance process usually serves all of them. Finding that out is often worth the fee on its own.
Got Questions? We’ve Got Answers
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An audit checks you against a standard you've already adopted and asks whether you're conforming. A gap analysis asks a broader question - where are you against the law, and where are you against good practice - without assuming you have a system in place at all. It's the right tool when you don't yet know what you don't know, which is most businesses that have never had one done.
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Length, scope and independence. A free audit is an hour and produces a proposal. This is five days across 20 sections and 135 scored questions, and it produces a report written to be read by your board and your insurer. It also isn't shaped by what we'd like to sell you next - the scoring rules decide what goes on the action plan, not us.
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No. The quality and environmental sections are built around legal duties and good practice rather than around a certificate, so it works just as well for a business with no ISO standards at all. If certification is on the horizon it gives you a head start, because most of what a certification body will ask for is already scored and evidenced.
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It's marked not applicable and excluded from both your score and the maximum, so it can't penalise you or inflate your result. That's common - no marked product, no trade effluent, no confined spaces. We record why, so the exclusion is auditable rather than convenient.
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It's the most common reason people call. An unplanned departure usually means records are spread across systems with nobody able to confirm they're complete, and whoever picks the role up spends months reconstructing history instead of managing risk. A scored baseline gives them an independently verified starting point in their first few weeks, and surfaces anything urgent straight away rather than leaving it to be found by an incident or an inspection.
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Yes - that's Module 1, £900 for two days on site covering twelve sections and 77 scored questions. It's the right starting point if safety is what's driving the enquiry, and you can add quality and environmental later. Most people take both at once because the extra three days cost less per day and because the disciplines overlap more than expected, but there's no penalty for starting with safety alone.
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Kick-off is usually within 20 working days of confirmation. The document request goes out immediately, the site work is two days or five depending on scope, and the scored report and action plan follow within five working days of the last site day. Start to finish, most engagements complete inside a month.
A 30-minute call first, so we can scope it properly and give you a fixed number before you commit to anything. If a full gap analysis is more than you need, we'll tell you that on the call rather than after the invoice.