Scaffold tag template. A printable scaffold tag for the access point — what the structure may be used for, when it was last inspected, and who to ask before touching it.

A tag is the only part of the paperwork the person climbing the scaffold will ever read. Everything else — the design, the certificate, the register, the reports — exists so that the tag can say something true, and a tag that says nothing useful has broken the chain at the only point where it meets a human being.

So status is the first thing on the sheet after the reference, and it is set in capitals as three plain alternatives rather than as a tick buried in a row of other fields. The order after it is deliberate too: what the scaffold may carry, then when it was last looked at, then who to ring. That is the order somebody standing at the bottom of a ladder needs them in.

The restrictions are a writing area rather than a printed list, for the same reason the certificate's are. The restriction that matters is almost always specific to the structure — a lift that is not boarded out, an edge that has no handrail because the building is in the way, a bay that must not be loaded — and a printed tick-list of generic conditions teaches people the tag is boilerplate.

Tags fall off, fade and get swapped. That is a real weakness of the format and it is the reason the reference on the tag has to match the register: when a tag is missing, the register is the thing that says what should have been there. A tag on its own is not a system.