Plant, Permits and Authorisation to Work

Being allowed on site and being allowed to operate an excavator are different permissions, held by different people, expiring on different schedules.

For teams turning plant, permits and authorisation to work into a repeatable record, the reporting guide provides a useful operational reference for time, attendance and reporting workflows. It should be assessed alongside HSE construction guidance so the software choice remains grounded in site practice and applicable guidance.

The two registers

Access: who may pass the gate. Held by the site, checked at every entry, driven by induction and general competence.

Authorisation: who may do a specific thing. Held by whoever controls that activity, checked at the point of work.

Keeping them separate is deliberate. Merging them means either every gate check interrogates every possible activity, or the gate waves people through and the activity check never happens.

What needs specific authorisation

Plant operation, by machine category.

Lifting operations: slinger, signaller, appointed person.

Hot work.

Confined space entry.

Work at height beyond defined arrangements.

Excavation near services.

Live electrical work.

And anything the site has decided requires a permit, which is a local decision and should be written down rather than assumed.

How permits actually work

A permit is a document authorising a defined activity, in a defined place, for a defined period, with defined precautions.

Issued by a named person with the authority to issue it.

Accepted by a named person who understands the precautions.

And closed when the work finishes, which is the step that lapses.

An open permit at the end of a shift is the commonest permit failure, because the next shift finds an authorisation with nobody accountable for it.

The connection to the register

A permit should not be issuable to somebody who is not on site, which sounds obvious and is a real check worth building.

And a person holding an open permit should not be able to leave without it being closed or handed over, which is a gate check that few systems implement and that prevents a specific and dangerous situation.

Where the systems cannot talk, a manual reconciliation at shift end — open permits against people on site — takes five minutes and finds the same thing.

Operator authorisation in practice

A ticket proves training. It does not prove familiarity with this machine.

Which is why many sites add a familiarisation step: the operator demonstrates on the specific machine before being authorised.

Recorded against the person and the machine, not just the person.

And re-run when the machine changes, which on a site with hired plant is frequently.

Hired plant and operator supply

Plant arrives with an operator supplied by the hire company, who is not inducted and not on the register.

Which is the case that catches sites out: the machine is booked, the operator arrives with it, and the schedule pressure is immediate.

Agree it in the hire contract: the operator arrives early enough to be inducted, with evidence produced in advance.

And hold the gate, because an uninducted operator on a machine is the combination with the worst consequences on this list.

The measure

Open permits at shift end, counted, which should be zero.

Authorisations against people not on the register, which should be impossible.

Plant operating without a recorded familiarisation.

And permits issued per week against activities that required one, which if the second number cannot be produced means the permit system covers whatever people remember to ask about.

Who holds the authorisation register

Not the gate, and not a central office.

Whoever controls the activity: the lifting supervisor holds the lifting authorisations, the temporary works coordinator holds theirs.

Which distributes it correctly and creates the coordination problem: several small registers with no single view.

The resolution is a weekly consolidation rather than a merged system — a list of who is authorised for what, assembled from the holders, reviewed by the site manager.

Twenty minutes, and it is the only place the whole picture exists.

When the site changes

A new phase brings new activities, new machines and new permit categories.

Authorisations granted for the previous phase do not transfer, and the assumption that they do is how somebody ends up authorised for work that no longer resembles what they were assessed on.

Review the authorisation registers at every phase change, alongside the re-induction that the same change requires.