Managing Permits Across Multiple Sites

A permit system that works well on one site usually fails on the third, and it fails in a specific way: nobody can answer "how many permits are live right now, and where?" without ringing round. The permits themselves are fine. The oversight above them has quietly stopped existing.

This guide covers what HSE guidance actually requires of co-ordination, why per-site registers stop adding up, and what a portfolio-wide view needs to show.

This guide covers UK practice and references HSE guidance. Legislation and standards may differ in other jurisdictions.

The duty is co-ordination, not paperwork

HSE's HSG250 is explicit that someone must hold the overview: "It is essential that a competent person (referred to as the 'area authority' in this guidance) is appointed to co-ordinate and control the issue and return of permits. That person should have an overview of all operations under way and planned on site to avoid hazards caused by simultaneous activities."

Note what that requires — an overview of work under way and planned, held by a named competent person, for the purpose of avoiding simultaneous-activity hazards. It is a live picture, not a filing duty.

HSG250 also gives the site manager the duty to ensure that "permits for work activities that may interact or affect other site activity are adequately controlled," and that "sufficient information is given to oncoming shifts about work for which there is a permit and which has not been completed."

Both duties assume someone can see everything at once. That assumption holds effortlessly on one site with three permits. It stops holding somewhere between the second site and the second shift, and nothing in the paperwork announces the change.

Why it breaks at the second site rather than the tenth

On a single site the register is a memory aid. The real oversight is that one person walks the site and sees the work. The document is a backup for a picture already in someone's head.

Add a second site and that inverts. Nobody walks both. The register stops being a backup for direct knowledge and becomes the only source of it — and a document designed as an aide-mémoire is now carrying the entire control.

Three specific failures follow:

Per-site registers do not aggregate. Three sites keep three registers, each internally accurate. There is no view of the whole, so nobody knows the portfolio holds eleven live permits or that four of them are overdue for close-out.

Shared resources are invisible. One mobile tower, one gas detector, one authorised issuer covering three sites. Each register shows its own permits; none shows that the same issuer is nominally supervising work in two places at once.

Close-out drifts unevenly. One site runs at 95%, another at 60%. Averaged, nothing looks wrong. The 60% site is where the incident happens, and per-site figures are the only way to see it.

The competing-priorities problem

The failure that actually causes harm is subtler than a missing form.

A permit issuer covering multiple sites is under pressure to keep work moving at all of them. HSG250 requires the issuing authority to confirm that "the work site has been examined, and all precautions specified to be taken before work commences (including isolations) have in fact been taken." Examining the work site means going there.

An issuer with three sites and a full day cannot examine three work sites at the times permits are wanted. Something gives, and what gives is the site visit — first for the routine permits, then for the ones that look routine. Nothing in the register records that a permit was signed from a van.

This is why HSG250's condition on electronic systems — that "permits cannot be issued remotely without a site visit" — matters more, not less, as you add sites. The convenience arrives exactly when the pressure to misuse it does. Our guide to who can issue a permit to work covers setting authorisation limits that account for this.

The structural answer is usually more authorised issuers, not a more efficient one. Authorising a competent person at each site costs training time and removes the pressure that produces remote signing.

What a multi-site view has to show

Six things, and the test is whether you can answer each in under a minute without phoning anyone:

1. Live permits by site. How many, what work, expiring when.
2. Overdue close-outs by site. Not the average — per site, because the average hides the outlier.
3. Permits approaching expiry. So extension is a decision rather than a discovery.
4. Suspended permits. These are the ones that get forgotten. A permit suspended on Thursday with an isolation still applied is a live hazard that looks dormant.
5. Who issued what. The pattern that reveals an issuer covering more ground than they can examine.
6. Interacting work. Two permits in the same area, or a permit against plant another permit has isolated.

Items 4 and 6 are the ones per-site paper registers almost never surface, and they are the two with the most direct route to harm.

Practical arrangements that work on paper

You do not need software to improve this, and if your single-site discipline is weak, software will not fix it. Three arrangements that work:

A named area authority per site, and one co-ordinator above them. HSG250 allows the site manager either to control issue and return themselves — which it calls "a preferable arrangement … where there are only a small number of permits daily" — or to appoint responsible people "with sufficient authority to carry out this function on their behalf." At multi-site scale you are in the second case. Name the people; do not leave it implied.

A short daily co-ordination call. Ten minutes, each site reporting live permits, expiries today, suspensions, and anything unusual. This is the cheapest genuine improvement available and it produces the aggregate view a paper system cannot.

A weekly close-out sweep per site. Someone checks every permit issued last week actually closed. Reported as a percentage per site, not portfolio-wide. Our permit to work register guide covers what the register needs to hold for this to be quick.

Where these fail is not the mechanism but the discipline: the daily call gets skipped when everyone is busy, which is precisely when the risk is highest. If the call is being missed, that is the signal that oversight has outgrown its arrangements — the same signal, in a different form, as not knowing your live permit count.

Subcontractors across sites

A subcontractor working on three of your sites will encounter three variants of your system if each site has evolved its own habits — different forms, different thresholds, different people to ask.

HSG250 puts a matching duty on contractors' management to "ensure that they understand the permit-to-work systems and other arrangements that apply to the particular locations at which they or their employees are to work." That is much easier to discharge against one consistent system than three local dialects.

Standardise the form, the permit types and the thresholds across sites even where local practice differs. Our permit to work procedure guide covers writing the rules once for all sites rather than letting each one drift.

Where to start

If you are managing permits across more than one site and cannot state your live permit count right now:

1. Count them today. Ring each site once and write the number down. That number is your baseline and it is usually a surprise.
2. Count suspended permits separately. Then check each one's isolation is still valid.
3. Get close-out rate per site for last month. If nobody can produce it, that is the finding.
4. Name an area authority per site, in writing, with the authority to refuse a permit.
5. Start the daily ten-minute call before changing anything else.

Only then consider tooling. The PTW readiness checker scores your current system against the HSG250 essentials, and the permit to work audit guide covers what an inspector examines when work spans several locations.

PermitPad is building a permit-to-work system with a portfolio-wide register — live permits, suspensions and close-out rate visible per site and across all of them, without anyone compiling a report. Join the waitlist to see it when it launches.

Key references

• HSG250: Guidance on permit-to-work systems — HSE, first edition 2005. Paragraph 33 (employer duties), paragraph 34 (interacting permits, shift handover), paragraph 35 (area authority and co-ordination), paragraph 36 (contractors' management), paragraph 51 (electronic permit conditions). Guidance, not law
• CDM 2015, regulation 13 (SI 2015/51) — the principal contractor's duty to plan, manage and monitor the construction phase and organise cooperation between contractors

Disclaimer

This guide is for general information only. How permit oversight should be arranged depends on your specific sites, work activities and sector. Always consult a competent H&S professional and the applicable legislation and sector guidance for your circumstances.