Permit to Work Excavations
Health & Safety Xpert™ Total Toolkit is an easy to use software package that will save you massive amounts of time producing crucial health and safety documentation legally required under current UK law. This includes the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974 and the new Construction Design Management (CDM) Regulations 2007.
The Permit to Work Excavations printout is available with Health and Safety Xpert Total Toolkit. Click here to view a sample Permit to Work Excavations PDF.
Under the Confined Spaces Regulation 1997, a Risk Assessment is an essential part of complying with these regulations and must be done (under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999) to determine a safe system of work for any excavation work.
The Risk Assessment should start with the measures both in design and procedures that can be adopted to enable any work to be carried out outside the excavation, where possible. The assessment must be done by a competent person and will normally be formalized into a specific Permit to Work (sometimes called a Permit to Dig), applicable to a particular task.
Method Statements need only be completed when there are unforeseen, unplanned or specialist activities on site which are not covered by relevant risk assessments. Method Statements are site-specific and can only be completed by a trained, experienced and competent person. Method Statements must be completed on site.
Notes:
Confined space means any space, including a chamber, tank, vat, silo, pit, trench, pipe, sewer, flue, well or similar place by its virtue of its enclosed nature, where there arises a reasonably foreseeable specified risk. Specified risk means a risk to any person at work of:
- Serious injury arising from fire or explosion
- Loss of consciousness arising from an increase in body temperature
- Loss of consciousness or asphyxiation arising from gas, fume, vapor or lack of oxygen
- Drowning arising from an increase in the level of liquid
- Asphyxiation arising from a free flowing solid or because of entrapment by it
Use the Permit to Work Excavations included with Health and Safety Xpert software to help you control hazardous work and authorise specific persons to undertake particular tasks in a designated area. The Permit to Work is designed to help you define the safety precautions to be taken depending on the nature of the work being performed and the hazards involved. You should use it to record the methods to be used and precautions to be taken which should be agreed to by all parties concerned beforehand and clearly stated on the Permit to Work. The Permit to Work must be signed off by all parties before any work commences. Permits to Work are only valid for specific short periods of time and therefore help you to monitor the on going use of suitable safe systems of work.
It is important to file these records so that they could be consulted by an inspector if necessary.