Compliance & standards
What is a handover certificate?
A handover certificate is the document a scaffolding contractor issues when a scaffold is complete and ready to use. It records what was handed over, what it is designed to carry, and when.
It is industry practice rather than a named legal requirement, and it exists because the person about to walk onto a scaffold needs to know it is finished. An unfinished scaffold and a finished one look similar from the ground.
A certificate typically records the structure and its location, the date of handover, the loading class or duty, the compliance sheet or design it was built to, and who is handing it over to whom. It is the point at which responsibility for using the scaffold correctly passes to the client.
It has to agree with the scaffold tag and with the inspection record. All three describe the same structure, and they drift apart the moment they are kept by three different people in three different places.
What goes wrong on site
- A certificate issued from a template with the loading class filled in from memory rather than from the design.
- Handover recorded in the office while the tag on the scaffold still says incomplete.
- Adaptations after handover with no reissued certificate, so the document describes a structure that no longer exists.