Key takeaways
  • A permit is not paperwork, it is a conversation with a record. Its job is to make someone stop and check before a high-risk task begins.
  • The four that almost always need one: hot work, confined space, working at height, and any work on live or isolated systems.
  • Most permit systems fail at close-out, leaving jobs open with nobody confirming the area was made safe.
Where permit systems break
Permits issued: 340. Permits closed: 190.

An open permit means, formally, that hazardous work is still in progress. When half your permits are never closed, the system stops telling you anything, and a genuinely open job looks exactly like an administrative loose end.

Which jobs need a permit

  • Hot work. Welding, cutting, grinding or anything producing sparks or flame outside a designated area.
  • Confined space. Tanks, pits, silos, ducts: anywhere with restricted entry and a potential atmospheric hazard.
  • Working at height. Roof work, scaffolding, anything where a fall is possible.
  • Live or isolated systems. Electrical work, and any intervention on pressurised, chemical or energised plant.
  • Excavation and ground disturbance, where buried services may be present.

The test is not how difficult the job is, it is whether the consequence of getting it wrong is severe and whether the controls depend on someone remembering. Routine work with a severe failure mode needs a permit more than unusual work with a mild one.

What a permit must actually contain

  • The specific task and its precise location, not "maintenance, Line 2".
  • The hazards identified for this job, on this day, in these conditions.
  • The controls required, and confirmation each one is in place before work starts.
  • Who is authorised to do the work, by name.
  • A validity window with a start and an expiry, usually one shift.
  • The issuer and the acceptor, signed separately.
  • Close-out: area made safe, isolations removed, equipment restored, signed.

The expiry that nobody enforces

A permit valid for one shift that is still being worked on in the next shift is no longer valid, however convenient that is. Either the permit is re-issued with the incoming crew, or the work stops. Systems that quietly allow permits to run for days have stopped controlling anything.

Designing close-out so it happens

Close-out fails because it happens when the job is finished, everyone is tired, and the value is not obvious. Three things help: make the permit chase itself when it passes expiry, require a positive confirmation that isolations were removed rather than a signature, and report open permits daily to a named person who has to act on the list.

Paper permits and their limits

A paper permit works fine at the point of issue and poorly afterwards. It cannot tell you how many are open right now, it cannot expire itself, and it cannot chase a close-out. A permit issued as a scheduled task, completed by the acceptor at the job, and automatically escalated when the validity window passes, gives you the one thing the paper version cannot: an accurate live count of what is open.