Daily plant inspection, defined: the operator's check of a machine such as an excavator, dumper or telehandler before it is used each day on a construction site, recorded and acted on.
A daily plant inspection is the check an operator makes on an item of construction plant before it is used each day on site, to confirm it is safe to operate, with the result recorded and any defect reported before the machine works. In UK construction, plant means the mobile machinery on site: excavators, dumpers, rollers, telehandlers, loaders and the like. In the United States a plant inspection usually means an agricultural or factory inspection, which is not this.
The definition matters because the machines involved are the ones that kill and maim on construction sites, and the daily check is the only inspection that happens often enough to catch a defect that appeared overnight. It is also the record the site manager, the hire company and, after an incident, HSE will ask for first.
What a daily plant inspection covers
The check is a walk round followed by a function test, done before the machine starts work and repeated if it changes hands during the day.
- Walk round: tracks or tyres, hoses and hydraulic leaks, pins and bushes, the quick hitch and its safety pin, attachments, steps and handrails, guards, mirrors and cameras, the ROPS or FOPS structure, fluid levels, fuel and coolant.
- In the cab: seat belt, controls and their labels, the beacon, horn, lights, reversing alarm, wipers, the display and any warning lamps.
- Function test: brakes, steering, boom and bucket movement, the quick hitch engagement, and on a telehandler the load-moment indicator.
- Record: date, machine identifier, operator, defects found, action taken.
Plant that lifts, an excavator used for lifting or a telehandler with forks, also carries lifting accessories that get a look at the same time: chains, hooks and their tags.
Who is responsible under PUWER and CDM 2015
Two sets of regulations meet on the machine. The Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998 (PUWER) require work equipment to be suitable, maintained in a safe condition and, where its safety depends on its condition, inspected at suitable intervals by a competent person with the result recorded. HSE reads the same regulations as expecting a simple check by the user before use, which is where the daily plant inspection sits. Lifting plant additionally falls under LOLER, which requires a thorough examination by a competent person, typically every 12 months, or every 6 months where the equipment lifts people. The operator's daily check does not replace either.
The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 add the site layer: contractors must not use plant that is unsafe, and the principal contractor is responsible for coordinating how plant is managed across the site. In practice that means the contractor that supplies the operator owns the daily check, and the site manager owns the system that makes sure it happened. The check is a pre-start check in the language of most site rules and the plant and machinery register is where the results get filed.
Daily plant inspection example: a missing quick hitch pin on a groundworks site
Groundworks on a housing site, a 13-tonne excavator, first thing on a Tuesday. The operator walks round and finds the safety pin missing from the quick hitch. Without it the bucket can drop off the hitch mid-swing. A photo of the empty pin hole goes on the report and the machine is left switched off.
The site manager pulls a replacement pin from the stores, the operator fits it, and the fitting is recorded on the same report with a second photo before the excavator digs a metre. Two weeks later the hire company queries a damaged hitch on an unrelated machine and the site can show, dated, which machine had which fault and what was done about it.
What a daily plant inspection does not do, and the mistakes teams make
It does not replace the weekly or periodic inspection. The competent-person inspection under PUWER and the thorough examination under LOLER are separate records with their own intervals.
It does not certify the operator. The machine being fit says nothing about whether the person in the seat holds the right card for it.
The recurring mistakes: a sheet ticked from the cab without walking round, hired plant assumed to be fine because it arrived yesterday, a defect written down and the machine used anyway, a second operator taking over at lunchtime with no fresh check, and a stack of identical sheets that look like they were completed in a batch on Friday. The health and safety inspection by the site's own team, or by HSE, tends to start with those sheets.
Where the plant inspection record goes
The record goes to the site office and into the plant file for that machine, alongside the thorough examination reports and the hire paperwork. On hired plant the same record settles the off-hire conversation about when a dent, a cracked window or a hydraulic leak first appeared, because the daily photos show the machine's condition on every day it was on site. After an incident it is the first document HSE reads.
Venta Capture, a product of VentaVid, is one way to collect that record: the operator is sent a link, follows the check steps in the mobile browser with no app, photographs each item as prompted, and the submission arrives in the site office timestamped and sealed for review. See the Venta Capture pages.
In practice: see how field service teams use Venta Capture.