Scaffold inspection records: the seven day clock and the proof

This post in 30 seconds.

• Four triggers, not one. Regulation 12 of the Work at Height Regulations 2005 requires an inspection after assembly in position, at suitable intervals, after any event liable to jeopardise safety, and within the previous 7 days for a construction working platform you could fall 2 metres or more from.
• Eight particulars. Schedule 7 lists exactly what the report must contain. Items 5, 6 and 7 are the ones that get skipped.
• Two deadlines. The report is prepared before the end of the working period in which the inspection finishes, and reaches the person it was done for within 24 hours.
• Two homes. On site until the construction work is completed, then at an office for 3 months.
• The tag is not the record. A scafftag tells someone at the access point whether the scaffold is fit to use today. HSE does not require one, and it is not a Schedule 7 report.
• Who this is for: site managers, principal contractors and health and safety managers running scaffolds on UK construction sites.

On 18 June 2026 at Westminster Magistrates Court, Lima Construction Limited was fined £50,000 with £11,347 costs. The company had been in control of a former department store redevelopment on the High Street in New Malden. On 27 July 2022, Antonio Rodrigues, 55, fell from an external scaffold platform through an unglazed window void onto a concrete floor more than three metres below. He died on 1 August.

HSE's investigation found that the legally required weekly scaffold inspections had not been carried out after 5 July 2022. Three weeks with no inspection, and so no competent person looking at the unglazed voids. The guilty plea was not to a work at height offence at all. It was Regulation 13(1) of CDM 2015, the principal contractor's duty to plan, manage and monitor.

I have read a lot of HSE notices and that one stuck, because the failure is so ordinary. Nobody decided to stop inspecting. The paperwork just stopped arriving, and on a busy site an absence is quiet.

This post is not a definition. If you want the plain meaning of the term, we keep one on the scaffold inspection glossary page. This is about the record: what has to be in it, who it goes to and when, how long you hold it, and how to make it retrievable across fourteen sites eleven weeks later.

A note from us. We build Venta Capture, VentaVid's guided capture product, so that someone standing at the structure can produce a structured, dated, sealed record on their own phone. It does not inspect anything. A competent person still does that, on site. Read the operational sections first and decide whether the record-keeping half is worth changing.

In this post:

• The four triggers under Regulation 12
• Seven days is a ceiling, not a schedule
• Schedule 7: the eight particulars
• The working period, the 24 hours, the 3 months
• A scafftag is a status indicator, not the record
• The photographic record, per scaffold
• Holding it across sites: the retrieval test
• Where guided capture fits, and where it does not
• A 90 day way to see whether records got better
• Questions we get asked

The four triggers under Regulation 12

Most sites run a weekly inspection and treat that as the whole duty. It is one of four separate triggers, and the other three are event driven.

Regulation 12 of the Work at Height Regulations 2005 sets them out in plain language. Read it once a year, it takes four minutes.

The wording of 12(2) matters more than it looks: work equipment whose safety depends on how it is installed or assembled "is not used after installation or assembly in any position unless it has been inspected in that position." Not inspected at the yard. Not inspected last month at the previous address. In that position.

Trigger three is the one sites lose. Regulation 12(3)(b) requires an inspection "each time that exceptional circumstances which are liable to jeopardise the safety of the work equipment have occurred". A named storm, a delivery vehicle catching a standard, a ground works excavation next to the base, an alteration by anyone. The test is whether the circumstance was liable to jeopardise safety, not whether damage was later found. If you wait for damage to decide, you have inverted the duty.

Regulation 12(4) is the familiar one. A working platform used for construction work, from which a person could fall 2 metres or more, is not used in any position unless it has been inspected in that position, or for a mobile working platform inspected on the site, within the previous 7 days. HSE's scaffolds guidance puts the same thing as inspection "following installation / before first use" and "at an interval of no more than every 7 days thereafter".

There is a fifth clause that rarely reaches a site induction. Regulation 12(5) says work equipment must not leave your undertaking, or be used in your undertaking having come from someone else's, "unless it is accompanied by physical evidence that the last inspection required to be carried out under this regulation has been carried out." Hired towers and system scaffold arriving from a plant yard sit squarely in that sentence. If a tower turns up with no evidence of its last inspection, it is not yours to put into service on trust.

Seven days is a ceiling, not a schedule

Regulation 12(4) does not say inspect every seven days. It says the platform is not used unless it has been inspected within the previous seven days.

That is a backstop expressed from the point of use, and the difference shows up in three ways.

First, the clock runs from the inspection, not from the diary slot. An inspection completed at 16:30 on Tuesday covers use up to 16:30 the following Tuesday. Sites that book "scaffold inspections, Fridays" and slip to Monday have not moved a meeting. They have created two days of use with no valid inspection behind it.

Second, the seven day limit does nothing to the event trigger. A scaffold inspected on Monday and hit by a delivery on Wednesday needs an inspection on Wednesday. The weekly is unaffected and still due.

Third, "suitable intervals" under 12(3)(a) can be shorter than seven days, and on some structures should be. A scaffold on a coastal site in a windy autumn, a heavily loaded loading bay, a structure that trades are altering daily. Seven days is the outer limit the law will accept, not a risk assessment.

Who may do it is set by 12(10): "such visual or more rigorous inspection by a competent person as is appropriate for safety purposes", including any appropriate testing. HSE's position is that competence is a combination of knowledge, training and experience appropriate to the type and complexity of the scaffold, and that a non-scaffolder such as a site manager who has attended a scaffold inspection course could be deemed competent for a basic structure. NASC's guidance recommends the inspector holds the relevant CISRS card along with the necessary knowledge and experience. Competence is per structure, not per person, and it is worth writing down which of your people are signed off for which inspector competence scope.

For anything outside a recognised standard configuration such as NASC TG20 or the manufacturer's instructions, HSE expects a bespoke design by a competent person. Shoring, cantilevered, suspended and truss-out scaffolds are in that group by default, and the design sits alongside the inspection record rather than replacing it.

Schedule 7: the eight particulars

The report is not free-form. Schedule 7 lists eight particulars, and a report missing any of them is an incomplete report.

1. The name and address of the person for whom the inspection was carried out.
2. The location of the work equipment inspected.
3. A description of the work equipment inspected.
4. The date and time of the inspection.
5. Details of any matter identified that could give rise to a risk to the health or safety of any person.
6. Details of any action taken as a result of any matter identified in paragraph 5.
7. Details of any further action considered necessary.
8. The name and position of the person making the report.

Items 1 to 4 and 8 are administrative and they are almost always present, because a printed pad has boxes for them. Items 5, 6 and 7 are where reports go thin.

The common failure is a tick and the word "satisfactory". That is a defensible answer to item 5 only if the inspector genuinely identified nothing, and it says nothing at all about items 6 and 7. Item 6 asks what you did about what you found. Item 7 asks what still needs doing, which is the sentence that carries the job forward to the next inspection and to whoever picks up the structure next.

Look at the New Malden case through Schedule 7 and the shape of it changes. An unglazed window void next to a working platform is exactly an item 5 matter. Whether it was ever written down is a different question from whether anyone saw it. That is the point of a structured inspection report: it forces the question at the moment the person is standing there.

Two more things worth getting right in the wording:

• Item 2, location, has to identify the structure, not the site. "Scaffold, New Malden" is not a location when there are six scaffolds. Give each structure a permanent reference and use it on every report, every tag and every photo.
• Item 3, description, should let a stranger recognise it. Type, elevation, number of lifts, ties pattern, loading class, whether it is designed or TG20 compliant, sheeted or open.

Regulation 12(6) sits underneath all of this and is easy to miss: the result of an inspection must be recorded and kept until the next inspection under the regulation is recorded. So even where a Schedule 7 report is not triggered, the result still has to exist somewhere retrievable.

The working period, the 24 hours, the 3 months

Three deadlines govern a scaffold inspection record, and only one of them is the seven days everybody quotes.

Regulation 12(7) applies to inspections of the working platforms covered by 12(4), which for a construction scaffold you could fall 2 metres or more from means in practice every inspection you do of it. The person carrying out the inspection must:

• Before the end of the working period within which the inspection is completed, prepare a report containing the Schedule 7 particulars.
• Within 24 hours of completing the inspection, provide the report or a copy to the person on whose behalf it was carried out.

Then Regulation 12(8) hands the receiving employer two obligations. Keep the report or a copy at the site where the inspection was carried out until the construction work is completed, and thereafter at an office for 3 months.

Read those two paragraphs together and you can see where records die. The inspection is usually carried out by the scaffolding contractor. The "person on whose behalf" is usually the principal contractor. So the 24 hour deadline is not an internal filing step, it crosses an organisational boundary, on a Friday, between two companies with different systems.

What that looks like in practice: a photo of a paper pad sent to a site WhatsApp group, a PDF emailed to a site manager who leaves the project in October, a folder on a site laptop that goes back to the office when the cabin is demobbed. Every one of those satisfies a person and none of them satisfies 12(8)(b) reliably, because the three month retention starts exactly when the site stops existing as a place to keep things.

Set the data retention rule once, at the system level, and stop relying on the person who happened to be copied in. Three months after completion is the floor, not the ceiling. Personal injury limitation in England and Wales runs longer than three months, and anyone who has been asked for a scaffold record two years after a job will keep them well past the statutory minimum.

Worth thirty seconds of your time. If you cannot say today where the inspection reports for a project you completed in June are physically or digitally held, that is the gap, and it is the cheapest one on this list to close. See how a sealed inspection case is stored and retrieved.

A scafftag is a status indicator, not the record

HSE is explicit about this, and the sentence is worth pinning up. Asked whether scafftags are required, HSE's construction work at height FAQ answers: "No, it is not a legal requirement to use scafftags, but using a visible tag system to supplement inspection records is one way of recording that the scaffold has been checked before use." NASC puts it the same way: "It is not a requirement that a scaffold is tagged when inspected."

Supplement is the operative word. The tag and the report do two different jobs.

Two failure modes follow from confusing them.

The first is a green tag with no report behind it. Somebody turned the insert, nobody wrote the eight particulars, and the site believes it is covered because the visual signal is right. In an investigation the tag proves that a signal was displayed. It does not prove an inspection happened.

The second is quieter and more common. The report is filed correctly and the tag is never turned after an alteration. A trade drops a guard rail to land materials, the tag still says fit for use, and the next operative reads a signal that is a week out of date. Whoever alters a scaffold owns the tag at that moment.

A workable rule for a site induction: the tag is turned by the person who changes the structure's status, the report is written by the competent person who inspected it, and the tag insert carries the same structure reference as the report. If the tag says B3 and the report says "rear elevation", you have two records that cannot be joined.

The photographic record, per scaffold

Nothing in Regulation 12 or Schedule 7 asks for a photograph. Hold one anyway, because items 5, 6 and 7 are the contested ones and words alone do not settle them months later.

The argument for photographs is not compliance. It is that "guard rail missing at third lift, refitted same day" is a claim, and a dated image of the third lift before and after is inspection evidence. When a job is reviewed after an incident, the questions are about condition at a point in time, and condition is visual.

A workable set, repeated per scaffold, per inspection:

1. The access point with the tag in shot and legible. This ties a date and a status to a structure in one frame.
2. The full elevation from a fixed standing point. Same spot every week. Week to week change becomes visible instead of being argued about.
3. The base. Sole plates, base plates, standing ground, any excavation or stored material that has appeared near it.
4. Ties. Shot in a stated pattern with the count spoken aloud, because tie number and position is where an alteration shows up first.
5. Edge protection at each working lift. Guard rails, toe boards, brick guards, and any void, opening or unglazed window next to a deck.
6. The working deck. Boards, traps, gaps, loading, debris.
7. Every item 5 matter, before and after the item 6 action. Two frames, taken minutes or days apart, and the second one is what closes the loop.

Six or seven frames and a spoken note. It adds a few minutes to an inspection that is already happening, and it is the difference between a record that describes a scaffold and a record that shows one.

Three rules keep the set usable rather than a folder of 4,000 loose images:

• One reference per structure, for its whole life. The same string on the report, the tag insert, the photo set and the handover. Photographs that cannot be attached to a structure are decoration.
• Same positions, same order, every time. Comparability is the entire value. A different angle each week gives you seven unrelated pictures.
• Capture at the structure, not later from the gallery. A photo taken on the deck and submitted there carries device context and a server-verified receipt time. One selected from a camera roll on Thursday evening carries a claim about Tuesday. The distinction is worth understanding properly, and we wrote it up as upload versus capture.

One caution, and it is the one people get wrong. A timestamp proves when a system received a file. It does not prove when the scaffold was in that condition. Schedule 7 item 4 asks for the date and time of the inspection and that is a fact the inspector states, so keep it as a written field on the report rather than inferring it from file metadata. We keep a longer explanation on the timestamp glossary entry, and the honest version is short: the receipt time is strong evidence about your process and weak evidence about the world.

Holding it across sites: the retrieval test

A record you hold and cannot produce is, in an investigation, the same as a record you do not hold.

Here is the test. Pick one live project. Ask for every inspection report for one named scaffold, in date order, for the last eleven weeks, with the photographs attached and the item 7 entries readable. Give the person an hour.

On most multi-site operations that request fails, and it fails for structural reasons rather than lazy ones:

• The reports were written by three different scaffolding subcontractors on three different pads.
• Two arrived as photos of paper in a WhatsApp group that has since hit its media retention.
• The site with the best records demobbed in July and the folder is on a laptop.
• Nobody can join the tag reference to the report reference because the tag says "front" and the report says "elevation A".
• The one report that matters is the one where somebody wrote "see attached" and nothing was attached.

With 14 sites and 40 structures you are producing something like 40 reports a week, over 2,000 a year, before event triggered inspections. That volume is not a paperwork problem, it is a filing system problem, and paper pads do not have a filing system.

What a working setup looks like, whatever tool you use:

• One permanent reference per structure, issued when it is handed over, used until it is struck.
• One flow for every inspector, whether they are your employee or a subcontractor, so the eight particulars come back in the same fields every time.
• Report and photographs in the same record, not in two systems that have to be joined by a human.
• A dated, ordered timeline per structure, so the eleven week question is a filter rather than an archaeology project.
• Retention set once, at the system level, running past the statutory three months.
• Access for the principal contractor and the scaffolding contractor, because 12(7)(b) is a handover between them.

That last point is the one that most often needs a tool rather than a policy. The 24 hour duty is on the person who did the inspection, the 3 month duty is on the employer who received it, and if the handover depends on a named individual remembering to forward an email, it will hold until that individual is on holiday.

Where guided capture fits, and where it does not

Start with what it does not do. The inspection is a visual or more rigorous examination by a competent person, on site, under Regulation 12(10). Venta Capture does not inspect, does not assess, and does not certify anything. Nor does it decide whether a structure is fit for use. That judgment belongs to the person standing at it, and no software changes who is accountable for it.

What it does is the other half: it produces the dated record and the photographic evidence, in a shape you can retrieve.

The mechanism is straightforward. Your competent person opens a secure, personal capture link on their phone, or scans a QR code that can sit on the tag holder, on a site notice or in a confirmation email. No app to install, no account to create, straight into the mobile browser. They work through the flow your organisation built, and submit at the structure.

The flow is the part that matters, because it is where your standard lives. Build the eight Schedule 7 particulars as fields rather than a free-text box. Pre-fill the ones you already know (the person for whom the inspection is carried out, the structure reference, the description from the handover). Put the photo set in as labelled slots with an example image per slot so a new inspector sees what a good tie shot looks like. Make the item 5 question a yes or no that opens the item 6 and item 7 steps when it is yes, so nobody can submit a defect without saying what they did and what still needs doing.

What comes back is a case rather than a folder of files: the answers as structured fields, the photos and video, a transcription of anything spoken, the customer or site reference in your own format, and a complete timeline of what happened and when. Each submission carries a digital seal with a SHA-256 fingerprint and a downloadable manifest that can be verified outside the system. That is the practical backing for evidence integrity rather than an adjective, and it is the same audit trail logic you would want on any proof of work record.

A few details that map onto the duties above:

• The 24 hour handover becomes routing. A submitted case can land in the principal contractor's inbox and the scaffolding contractor's at the same time, with notifications per route. The form can also send the submitter their own copy, so both parties are looking at the same file when something is disputed later.
• The three month retention becomes a setting. Retention and auto-purge are configurable, with audit logs, and you set it once instead of per site.
• Photographs taken in the session are labelled as such, with the receipt time server verified. Anything chosen from the phone's gallery is labelled "Provenance: Not verified" with a plain-language explanation of what that does and does not mean. The product tells you what it can and cannot prove, which is the only honest way to hold evidence.
• A staff member can start a capture themselves without a link being sent, which suits a site manager doing an event-triggered check after a storm.
• The flow runs in the inspector's own language, across 15 languages, including the system text. On a site where the scaffolding crew's first language is not English, the questions being understood is not a nice-to-have.

Two honest limits. Flows with conditional branching, routing rules and integrations into your existing systems are set up around your process as a paid setup, scoped on a call, not something you assemble between jobs. And there is no automatic scheduling of recurring capture requests: your weekly still needs to be driven by your planning, the same as it is now.

Venta Capture is freemium. There is a free plan, no credit card, and you can be live in 10 minutes with a first flow and a test capture. Stuck? Book a free setup call and we build your first flow together. Start for free and build the Schedule 7 flow on a real scaffold this week, or read how the same pattern works for equipment verification and remote inspection software more generally.

A 90 day way to see whether records got better

Before changing anything, spend 30 days counting what you already produce. Most sites have never measured record completeness, so any improvement is asserted rather than shown.

Four numbers, and you can collect all of them with a spreadsheet.

1. Expected reports. For each structure, count the scaffold-weeks it was in use, add one for first use after assembly, and add every event you logged (wind, impact, alteration). That total is what Regulation 12 expected of you in the period.

2. Retrievable reports. Not reports you believe exist. Reports someone produced inside an hour, in date order, tied to the right structure. Divide by the expected number and you have your retrieval rate. Do not set a target on the first count. The first count is the target.

3. Handover lag. For each report, the gap between the time of inspection in Schedule 7 item 4 and the time the principal contractor actually received it. Count how many exceeded 24 hours. This is usually the number that surprises people.

4. Schedule 7 completeness. Score each report out of eight. Then count separately how many have a non-empty item 7. Item 7 is your leading indicator, because a report where nobody ever considers further action necessary is a report where nobody is really looking.

Then change one thing. Not five. Move one contractor's inspections onto a structured flow, or add the photo set to one site, and leave everything else alone for 60 days. Remeasure at day 90 with the same four numbers.

Two warnings about the numbers themselves. Retrieval rate often gets worse before it gets better, because the first honest count is lower than the assumed one. And health and safety inspection metrics go bad the moment they are used to rank individuals, because the fastest way to raise a completeness score is to stop recording defects. Measure the system, not the inspector.

Worth keeping the scale in view while you do it. HSE's provisional 2025/26 figures record 126 workers killed in work-related incidents in Great Britain, with falls from a height the most common cause at 31, and construction the industry with the most deaths at 25. The record is not the safety. The record is how you find out whether the safety is happening on the weeks when nobody is watching.

Lifting equipment on the same site runs on a different clock and a different report, covered in LOLER inspection records. The photo standard behind all of it is in what makes a check provable.

Questions we get asked

Does a scaffold inspection have to be weekly?

Not exactly. Regulation 12(4) says a construction working platform you could fall 2 metres or more from is not used unless it has been inspected in that position within the previous 7 days, so seven days is the outer limit measured backwards from use, not a fixed weekly slot. Suitable intervals under 12(3)(a) can be shorter where conditions warrant it, and an inspection is also due after assembly and after any event liable to jeopardise safety.

Is a scafftag a legal requirement?

No. HSE's construction work at height FAQ states that it is not a legal requirement to use scafftags, but that a visible tag system is one way of supplementing inspection records so people can see the scaffold has been checked before use. NASC says the same. The tag is a status indicator at the access point and the Schedule 7 report is the legal record.

Who is allowed to inspect a scaffold?

A competent person, defined in Regulation 12(10) as someone carrying out such visual or more rigorous inspection as is appropriate for safety purposes. HSE describes competence as knowledge, training and experience appropriate to the type and complexity of the scaffold, and notes a non-scaffolder such as a site manager who has attended a scaffold inspection course could be deemed competent for a basic structure. NASC recommends the relevant CISRS card alongside the necessary knowledge and experience.

What has to be in a scaffold inspection report?

The eight particulars in Schedule 7: the name and address of the person the inspection was for, the location of the equipment, a description of it, the date and time, details of any matter identified that could give rise to a risk, details of any action taken as a result, details of any further action considered necessary, and the name and position of the person making the report.

How long do we have to keep scaffold inspection records?

Regulation 12(8) requires the report or a copy to be kept at the site where the inspection was carried out until the construction work is completed, and thereafter at an office for 3 months. Separately, Regulation 12(6) requires the result of an inspection to be recorded and kept until the next inspection is recorded. Three months is a floor, and most organisations keep them considerably longer given how long a claim can take to arrive.

Do photographs count as the inspection record?

No. Schedule 7 does not mention photographs, and a set of images is not a report. Hold photographs as supporting evidence attached to the report, particularly for items 5, 6 and 7, where a before and after frame settles questions that prose cannot. The report remains the record.

Can software carry out the inspection for us?

No, and be wary of anyone suggesting otherwise. The inspection is a judgment made by a competent person at the structure. Guided capture produces the dated record and the photographic evidence in a retrievable form, routes it to the person it is owed to, and holds it for as long as you set. What is fit for use remains a human decision, and it remains yours.

Talk to us

If you are a principal contractor with more scaffolds than filing discipline, the honest first step is the retrieval test above. Run it on one project this week. Whatever it returns will tell you more than a policy review.

If it returns badly and you want the record-keeping half fixed, we can show you what a Schedule 7 flow looks like with the photo set built in, on one of your own structures, and you can decide from there.

Start for free and build the flow yourself in an afternoon, or book a demo and we will walk through it against your current process.

Written by the VentaVid team. We build guided capture so the person who is already standing at the structure can produce a record your organisation can rely on.