Who Owns the Register

Installation is a project. Maintaining the register is a permanent job, and on most sites it is assigned to nobody in particular.

For teams turning who owns the register into a repeatable record, the platform page provides a useful operational reference for time, attendance and reporting workflows. It should be assessed alongside Chartered Institute of Building so the software choice remains grounded in site practice and applicable guidance.

The recurring work

Enrolment and removal, continuously, as people arrive and leave.

Chasing competence expiries, with a forward list.

Temporary accesses: granting, expiring, reporting.

Reconciling the register against head counts.

Running the drill and closing what it found.

Producing the commercial reconciliation and the client reporting.

And chasing subcontractors for evidence that has not arrived.

On a large site this is a full role. On a medium one, a substantial part of somebody's week.

What decays first

Exits, because nobody notices them not happening.

Then expiries, which accumulate silently until a refusal or an audit.

Then temporary accesses, which become the arrangement.

Then the drill, which is the only item with no deadline attached and therefore the first to be skipped.

And finally the chain data, as new subcontractors are added without the engaging company being recorded.

Naming the owner

One person, named, with allocated time and the authority to refuse access.

That last part matters: an owner who has to escalate every refusal will stop refusing within a fortnight.

With a deputy, because the gate opens at six and holidays happen.

And sitting close enough to the site to know what is going on, rather than in a regional office running reports.

What the role is not

A gateman. The gate is staffed separately; the owner maintains the system behind it.

A data entry function, which should sit largely with the subcontractors.

Or a compliance officer with no operational standing, which produces accurate reports about an arrangement nobody follows.

The runbook

How somebody is enrolled, and what is required first.

How a temporary access is granted, by whom, and how it expires.

How the drill is run and what is recorded.

How the reconciliation is produced.

And what to do when a subcontractor will not produce evidence.

Written so the deputy can run a month unaided, which is the test and which almost no site passes.

Handover between phases

Site teams change as a project moves, and the register owner frequently changes with them.

Which is the moment the arrangement lapses, because the new person inherits a system and not the reasons behind its settings.

Hand over the runbook, the open items and the known problems, including what is wrong and not yet fixed — the document nobody writes and the most useful one in the set.

What to report

Weekly: unmatched entries, temporary accesses, expiries due.

Monthly: reconciliation, enrolment completion by subcontractor, refusals by reason.

Quarterly: drill result with timings, chain map refresh, data retention check.

And at each phase change: re-induction completion and authorisation register review.

The measure of whether the role exists

Ask when the last drill was and what the time was.

If nobody knows, the register is a list that was accurate on the day it was built, and every other failure in this collection is already underway.

The first month for a new owner

Run a drill, unannounced, and time it.

Compare the register against a head count at two in the afternoon.

Pull the expiry position and count what is already past.

Count temporary accesses and find out who authorised each.

Ask five people which company engaged them.

Five tasks, and they produce a complete picture of where the arrangement actually is rather than where the documentation says it is.

What to escalate

A subcontractor repeatedly presenting unverified people, which is a commercial conversation.

A gate layout that cannot handle the peak, which is a logistics decision.

Welfare provision below the register's peak headcount.

These sit above the owner's authority, and presenting them with numbers is the role's main contribution beyond the routine work.