PUWER inspection cost, scoped from your machinery, not a menu

Scoping is the price: the machine census that fixes the number

PUWER covers work equipment, and work equipment is nearly everything: fixed machinery, portable tools, conveyors, racking, workshop doors. No provider can price that honestly without knowing what you run. So a PUWER quote starts with a machine census: the list of equipment in scope, with photos, exactly as our quoting process asks.

The census does two jobs. It fixes the quote, and it becomes the spine of your compliance: the equipment register an HSE inspector asks for first. A duty holder who builds the census once finds every subsequent year cheaper, because the quote is a revision rather than a survey.

What matters on the census is not polish, it is coverage. The machine that hurts a business in an investigation is almost never the production line everyone remembered, it is the bench grinder, the pillar drill, the compressor in the corner nobody listed. Walk the site once, list everything with a plug or a motor, photograph it, and the scope is real

Photos earn their place here just as they do under LOLER, but they answer a different question. A lifting photo settles type and condition. A PUWER photo settles guarding: whether the dangerous parts are enclosed, interlocked or open to the shop, which is the single biggest variable in how long the machine takes to assess. Ten minutes of photography around the workshop routinely turns a broad estimate into a fixed, itemised figure.

The five duties, and what each one adds to inspection time

A competent PUWER inspection assesses each machine against the duties the regulations place on you, and each duty adds its own minutes. This is where inspection time, and therefore price, actually goes

The duties are not a menu. Every machine is assessed against all of them, and the variation between machines is how much each duty weighs: a compressor’s minutes concentrate in condition and environment, a press brake’s in guarding and controls. Reading your own fleet this way predicts the quote before it arrives.

Suitability and condition

Is the machine right for the job it is doing now, in the environment it is doing it in, and has it been kept in efficient working order? Fast on a well kept machine, slower where modification, repair history or a change of use has to be understood.

Guarding, controls and isolation

Dangerous parts, guards, interlocks, emergency stops, isolation. This is the heart of the inspection and the largest share of the time on most machines. A press brake with light guards and interlocked gates simply carries more to check than a pedestal drill, and the price per machine reflects exactly that.

Information, training and the working environment

Markings, warnings, instructions available, lighting and space around the machine. Quick per machine, but they are the findings that most often surprise duty holders, because they fail on paperwork rather than steel

They are also where the fixes are cheapest, a sign, a reprinted instruction sheet, a cleared walkway, but only when the record names them machine by machine. A finding that says signage generally is a finding nobody actions, which is one more reason the per machine record format matters as much as the inspection behind it.

Risk sets the interval, and the interval sets the annual cost

PUWER sets no fixed calendar. Regulation 6 requires inspection where safety depends on installation conditions, at suitable intervals where equipment is exposed to deterioration, and after exceptional events, with the result recorded and kept until the next inspection. The interval is a competence judgement about risk, not a date printed in the regulations.

For budgeting this cuts both ways. A duty holder cannot stretch intervals to save money, the interval has to be defensible against the risk. But nor should every machine default to the shortest cycle: a risk based programme puts the inspection money where the risk is, which is usually cheaper and always more defensible than a flat annual everything approach.

Our quotes state the proposed interval per machine and the reasoning in a line, so the programme you approve is a risk judgement you can show an inspector, not a subscription you were sold

The exceptional event rule deserves its own budget line on sites that have them: a collision, a flood, a machine returned from loan or long storage all trigger an inspection outside the programme. These are quoted as single attendances against the existing census, which is quick precisely because the census exists. The first inspection after an event is never the moment to be discovering the fleet.

Where inspection time really goes: guarding, isolation and the production clock

Two machines of the same type can inspect in very different times, and the difference is nearly always one of three things.

• Guarding complexity. Interlocked guards, light curtains, two hand controls and braking systems all get function checked. More protective measures means more to verify, which is the right kind of expensive
• Isolation and access. A machine that can be safely isolated, opened and reached inspects quickly. One buried in a line, sharing isolation with three neighbours, takes planning and minutes
• The production clock. Inspecting around a running shift, in gaps, costs attendance time. A planned window, even a short one, lets a whole area clear in sequence

None of this is padding, it is where a real inspection differs from a walk past with a clipboard. When a quote for a guarded press comes in at hand tool money, the scope has been cut somewhere you will not see until it matters.

One visit, two regimes: pricing PUWER alongside LOLER

Most sites that need PUWER also run lifting equipment, and the overlap is priced badly more often than any other part of work equipment compliance. A forklift is the classic case: its lifting function is thoroughly examined under LOLER, while the truck as work equipment, brakes, lights, controls, operator protection, sits under PUWER. Two duties, one machine.

The paperwork pairs as neatly as the visit does. The LOLER side produces its statutory report, the PUWER side its record, and a combined attendance hands both over together, dated the same day, filed against the same machine. For a duty holder showing an inspector or an insurer a coherent story, one machine with two documents from one visit reads far better than the same machine inspected by strangers to each other.

Priced separately by two providers, the machine is visited twice, isolated twice and administered twice. Priced together, one attendance covers both and the fixed costs are carried once. The same logic runs through workshops: the press is PUWER, the jib crane above it is LOLER, and one planned visit clears the pair.

Mobile plant doubles the point. A MEWP’s people lifting function sits on LOLER’s six month cycle while the machine itself, its controls, tyres, stability systems and operator protection, is work equipment under PUWER. Sites that hire MEWPs long term inherit both duties for the hire period, and both are cheapest cleared by one engineer who is already standing next to the machine.

This is the single biggest structural saving available on a mixed site, and it is why we ask for the whole equipment picture when quoting, not just the machines that prompted the call. The LOLER cost page covers the lifting side of the same visit.

Portable tools, hire kit and the long tail of small equipment

Every site has a long tail: the drills, grinders, saws and heaters that outnumber the fixed machines ten to one. PUWER covers them all, including hired equipment and kit an employee brings from home, because the duty follows use at work, not ownership. Pricing the tail sensibly is what separates a proportionate programme from an expensive one.

The proportionate answer is class based. Identical small tools inspect to an identical scope, so the time per item falls sharply with volume, and the quote should show that: fifty angle grinders are not fifty separate prices, they are one scope applied fifty times with a rate that reflects it. The census still lists every item, because the record has to name what was inspected, but the pricing recognises the repetition.

Two boundary lines are worth drawing on the quote so they never blur on site. PAT testing is an electrical safety check, it is not a PUWER inspection, and a portable tool can pass PAT with a shattered guard. And hired plant arrives with the hirer’s paperwork, but the moment it works on your site, the PUWER duty to see it is suitable, maintained and inspected sits with whoever controls the work. A quote that covers the tail, names the PAT boundary and includes hire kit on the census is covering the equipment that actually causes the incidents.

What a PUWER quote should itemise

Because PUWER has no statutory report format, the quote is where the scope gets pinned down. A quote worth accepting states:

• The census, attached. Every machine in scope listed, so in scope and out of scope are explicit before anyone attends
• The scope per machine class. What is assessed: guarding, controls, isolation, condition, markings, environment
• The proposed interval per machine, with the risk reasoning in a line
• The record, defined. A written, dated record per inspection with findings graded and actions listed, yours to keep
• Attendance stated once, and the terms for re inspection after remedial work

Compare quotes on the annual figure for the whole census, not the headline attendance. A programme with sensible risk based intervals can carry a higher looking visit price and a lower year, because fewer machines are on unnecessarily short cycles. The census plus the interval column is the entire annual cost, visible before you commit, which is exactly how a statutory programme should be bought.

Ask for a sample record with the quote, exactly as you would ask an LEV provider for a sample report. Two minutes with a real example shows whether findings are graded, whether actions carry dates and whether the document would stand up in front of an inspector, and it is a far better basis for choosing than any difference between two headline figures.

And the red flag, worth repeating because it decides more PUWER purchases than anything else on this page: the word certificate on a PUWER quote. The document that protects you is the record. A provider selling certificates is selling the absence of one.

What moves a PUWER price up or down

As with lifting equipment, everything in the middle column belongs to the duty holder. The provider’s rates matter, but the shape of the programme decides the bill

Use the table before you request quotes, not after they arrive. Every row you move to the left column before asking is a row no provider has to price uncertainty for, and the quotes that come back will be lower and, more usefully, comparable.

The first year and every year after: how a programme reprices

A PUWER programme has two price shapes, and knowing which one a quote describes stops false comparisons. Year one carries the census build, the first full scoping of every machine and the interval setting. It is the expensive year by design, because it creates the assets every later year reuses.

Steady state is cheaper: the census is a revision, the scopes exist, the intervals are set, and inspection time goes into inspecting rather than discovering. A provider quoting your second year at first year money has not priced the work, they have priced the template, and it is fair to ask the question in exactly those terms.

The records make this portable. Inspection records belong to the duty holder, so a site that switches providers hands the census and the records to the incomer and buys a steady state year, not a fresh year one. Keeping the register current between visits is what protects that position, and it costs a line in a spreadsheet each time a machine arrives or leaves.

Multi site businesses get one more lever: a single census format and record format across every site. The scoping travels, the comparisons become meaningful, and a machine moved between sites keeps its history. Buying inspection site by site, in different formats from different providers, quietly rebuilds year one at every location, and it shows in the group’s total far more than any single rate does.

Getting a fixed PUWER quote for your site

We quote PUWER from your machine census and photos: scoped per machine, intervals proposed with reasons, the record defined, attendance stated once, and any LOLER, PSSR or LEV work planned into the same visit. No fixed price list, because no honest one exists for work this varied, and no certificates, because the law does not either.

Send your equipment list to info@seis.engineering or call 0330 043 8191. If the census does not exist yet, say so, the checklist that builds it in an afternoon is part of the service. The related reading: