Weekly site safety inspection

What you need to know

The plain-English guidance that comes with this document.

• Sites drift — the weekly walk is how you catch it. Edge protection gets moved for a delivery and not put back, a scaffold gets altered, leads get damaged, the welfare unit runs out. None of it is anyone's plan; it just happens on a busy site. A proper weekly look-round catches it before it hurts someone.
• Actually walk it — don't fill it in from the cabin. The value is in physically looking: put a boot on the scaffold, check the ladder's tied, open the first aid kit, look in the excavation. A checklist ticked at a desk is worse than none, because it looks like you checked when you didn't.
• Work at height and excavations are where people die — look hardest there. Falls are the biggest killer in construction, and trench collapse kills fast and silently. Give scaffolds, edges, ladders, towers and any excavation the closest look, and stop work if something's not right rather than "having a word later."
• The actions list is the point. Spotting a fault and not fixing it is worse than not looking — you've now got a record that you knew. Put a name and a date on every action, and check them off next week. The same action appearing three weeks running tells its own story.
• Scaffolds have their own inspection rules. A scaffold must be inspected by a competent person before first use, then at least every 7 days, and after anything that could have affected it (like bad weather). This walk-round complements that — it doesn't replace the scaffold inspection.
• Keep the sheets. A run of completed, dated inspections is simple, strong evidence that you actively manage site safety — valuable for a principal contractor, an insurer, or the HSE. File them with the job records.
• Applies UK-wide. Site inspection supports duties under CDM 2015, the Work at Height Regulations and the construction rules generally (HSE; HSENI in Northern Ireland).