Permits to work, and
the six a site actually issues.

A permit to work is not paperwork about dangerous work. It is a conversation between two people, held before the work starts, in which one of them says exactly what is about to happen and the other says under what conditions it may. The form exists to prove the conversation happened. A permit filled in afterwards has skipped the only part that mattered.

What a permit is, and what it is not

A permit is a written authorisation for a specific task, in a specific place, for a specific period, subject to specific precautions. Four elements, all of them narrowing. A permit that says "hot work, level 3, this week" has narrowed nothing and authorises everything.

It is not a risk assessment. The risk assessment establishes how the work will be done safely in general; the permit confirms that on this occasion, in this place, at this hour, the conditions that assessment assumed are actually present. RAMS that hold up covers the first half; this is the second.

It is also not a substitute for competence. Issuing a permit to somebody who cannot do the work safely simply documents who authorised the incident.

The six a construction site issues

Terminology varies between firms. The categories do not:

1. Hot work. Welding, cutting, grinding, brazing, anything producing flame or sparks. The distinguishing feature is the fire watch, which continues after the work stops, usually for an hour, and which is the element most often abandoned early.
2. Confined space entry. Tanks, chambers, ducts, deep excavations with restricted egress. Atmospheric testing before entry and a rescue plan that does not consist of somebody else climbing in.
3. Work at height. Where the control is not simply a scaffold, for instance fragile roofs, mansafe systems, work over water or open edges.
4. Safe isolation. Electrical, mechanical or pressurised. This one carries a switching schedule and lock-off, and its permit is the most procedurally strict because the failure mode is somebody re-energising a system another person is inside.
5. Excavation. Ground disturbance where services may be present or where the sides need support. It joins directly to the temporary works register.
6. Limitation of access. Who may not enter an area, and when. The one people forget is a permit at all, because it authorises an exclusion rather than a task.

The time a permit was raised is worth more than everything else on it. A permit created at 14:20 for work that started at 09:00 is not a control, it is an admission.

Who may issue one

The issuer must be competent in the hazard, must be independent of the pressure to get the work done, and must have the authority to refuse. Those three requirements pull against each other on a small site, where the person who knows the most about the work is often the person whose programme depends on it.

There is no perfect answer for a small firm. There is a workable one: name the issuers for each permit type in advance, in writing, and make it a short list. Ambiguity about who may sign is what produces a permit signed by whoever was standing there.

The lifecycle, which is where systems fail

Most permit systems handle issue well and everything after it badly. A permit has four stages and each needs a record:

• Request, with the task described by the person who will do it.
• Issue, with conditions attached and a time window stated.
• Suspension or extension, if conditions change or the work overruns. Overrunning without extending is the most common breach and almost nobody records it.
• Cancellation and hand back, confirming the area is safe, the isolations are removed and the fire watch is finished.

A permit that is issued and never closed is not evidence of safe work. It is evidence that nobody checked the work stopped.

How it goes wrong on real sites

1. The book lives in the cabin. Permits are raised where the book is rather than where the work is, so the description is written by somebody who has not seen it.
2. Blanket permits. One permit covering a week, a floor and several trades. Convenient, and it authorises nothing specific.
3. Retrospective completion. The pad is filled in at the end of the day so the file is tidy. This is worse than no permit, because it creates a document that asserts a control that did not exist.
4. No hand back. The job finished, the crew left, and the permit is still open in the book three weeks later.
5. The questions never change. A permit form written in 2011 asks about hazards the firm no longer encounters and is silent on ones it does, so it is completed by rote.

Where to start, on Monday

Open the permit book on your busiest site and look for two things. How many permits are still open, and how many were signed at a time that plausibly precedes the work. Those two counts tell you whether you have a permit system or a permit form.

Then read the questions on your hot work permit as though you had never seen them. If any of them cannot be answered wrongly, they are not doing any work, and the fire watch line is the one to check first.