Compliance & standards
What is a 7-day inspection?
A 7-day inspection is the recurring statutory inspection of a scaffold used as a working platform. Seven days is the maximum interval between inspections, not the only trigger for one.
Under Regulation 12 of the Work at Height Regulations 2005, a working platform from which a person could fall 2 metres or more must be inspected after installation or assembly in that position, must not be used unless it has been inspected in that position within the previous 7 days, and must be inspected each time exceptional circumstances liable to jeopardise its safety have occurred.
That last trigger is the one most often forgotten. Adverse weather is the obvious case, but a substantial alteration or an impact from a vehicle or a load also resets the position, regardless of how recently the scaffold was last looked at.
The duty rarely fails at the inspection. It fails at the tracking — a structure erected by one squad, inspected the following week by whoever was passing, then missed because the job moved to a different gang and nobody was counting from the right date. The clock belongs to the structure, not to the person who last looked at it.
What goes wrong on site
- Counting seven days from the last inspection somebody remembers rather than from the last one recorded.
- Treating the seven-day interval as the whole duty and missing the post-weather and post-alteration triggers.
- Inspection records held per job, so a contract with eleven structures has one clock instead of eleven.