Defects Found in Your PUWER Inspection

The immediate danger finding: stopping equipment without a certificate to revoke

When an inspection finds a defect creating immediate danger, PUWER gives you no examiner's grounding notice to lean on: the stop is your decision, made under your general duty, and made now. That absence of ceremony is exactly why the discipline matters more, because the only thing standing between the finding and the next operator is what you do in the following hour.

Repair, recheck and returning equipment to service on your own authority

Returning defective equipment to service under PUWER carries a trap symmetrical to the stop: with no external examiner mandated, the temptation is to let the repair itself be the authorisation. Resist it. The finding was made by a competent inspection; the closure should be too, and the record should show a named, competent person confirmed the repair before the equipment ran.

Match the repair to the safety function, not to the symptom. A guard defect is closed when the guard again performs its function at every accessible point, which is a test, not a glance. An interlock defect is closed when the interlock demonstrably stops the machine in every mode it protects, including the inching and setting modes where interlock defeats live. A brake, a stop, an emergency cable: each has a functional test, and the record entry that says tested and proven is worth ten that say fitted.

Where the defect had a repair by date rather than an immediate stop, the date is a boundary, not a target. Plan the work inside it, and if the date will be missed, make a positive decision before it passes: either stop the equipment until the repair, or have your competent person record why continued use remains justified and what compensating measures apply. A date that slides past in silence converts a managed defect into documented use of equipment you had declared would become dangerous.

Recheck ruthlessly after third party repairs. The contractor who serviced the press does excellent work and also left the guard fence panel off; the record's recheck entry is where that gets caught, and the inspection regime that assumes competence without verification will eventually document its own blind spot.

Defects found between inspections: the operator's finding is still a finding

The inspection interval is a maximum, not a schedule for noticing. Most equipment defects announce themselves between inspections, to the operator who hears the change, sees the crack or finds the guard loose, and an employer's defect system is judged by what happens to those findings just as much as the formal ones. PUWER's information and training duties exist so operators can recognise danger; the reporting route is what makes that recognition worth anything.

Make the route shorter than the shift. A defect book at the machine, a supervisor empowered to stop the line, a maintenance number that answers: the mechanics matter less than the latency. An operator report that takes three days to reach a decision maker is a system designed to lose the race against the failure it describes.

Treat operator findings with the same grading discipline as inspection findings: graded, recorded, closed with a recheck. The stakes are identical, and the record of an operator report handled well is powerful evidence of a living system rather than an annual ritual. Conversely, the pattern investigators feast on is the defect reported twice by operators, absent from the inspection records, and present in the incident file.

Feed the between inspection findings back into the inspection itself. If operators keep reporting the same guard working loose, the inspection checklist gains that guard, the interval for that machine shortens, and the fixings get engineering attention rather than repeated tightening. Regulation 6 asks for inspection where deterioration can lead to danger; the operators are telling you, in real time, exactly where that is.

When defects change the interval: the loop that proves your system thinks

A defect should never leave your inspection intervals exactly as it found them without somebody deciding so. Regulation 6 intervals are risk based, which cuts both ways: findings of deterioration are evidence the interval is too long for the conditions, and a clean run of inspections is evidence it might responsibly relax. The interval that never moves in either direction is the signature of a system on autopilot.

Work the loop explicitly after any significant defect. Ask what the deterioration rate implies: a guard fixing that works loose in four months makes a six month inspection a coin toss, and the record should show the interval halved with the reason. Ask whether the conditions changed: the machine moved outdoors, the shift pattern doubled, the material got more abrasive. And ask whether the inspection scope caught the defect or the defect found itself: a failure mode the checklist never examined is a checklist finding, not just an equipment one.

Record the decision even when the decision is no change. One line, defect reviewed, isolated cause, interval retained, converts silence into judgement. This is also where the power press exception earns a mention in any defect conversation: presses run on fixed statutory cycles that you cannot relax, and defects there change the maintenance and the in shift checks instead.

Reviewed intervals are also the cheapest credibility you can buy. An inspection record whose intervals visibly respond to findings tells an inspector the system is alive, and that impression colours how every other page of the file is read.

One estate, four regimes: where the PUWER defect sits among the certificates

A defect rarely respects regulatory boundaries, and the estates that handle defects worst are usually the ones that assume the certificate regimes have it covered. A fork lift carries a LOLER report for its lifting function; its brakes, steering, lights and seat interlock are PUWER matters that no thorough examination certifies. A compressor's receiver sits under PSSR; the drive guard and emergency stop are PUWER. The spray booth's airflow is the LEV test's business; the booth's door interlocks are yours.

Route each defect to its own regime and let each regime's machinery run. A brake defect on the truck is graded and closed in the PUWER record even though the truck's LOLER report is current and clean, because that report never looked at the brakes. A guard defect on the compressor does not wait for the next PSSR examination, which would not record it anyway. Cross regime confusion runs the other way too: a chain defect found during a PUWER walk round belongs to the LOLER world, wants the competent person's opinion, and may trigger an examination out of cycle.

The practical tool is a one page split per machine: which regime owns which system, who inspects it, on what cycle, and where the records live. Ten minutes per asset ends the this is covered by the certificate conversation permanently, and it is exactly the map an inspector asks for when a defect on a multi regime machine comes up.

Above all, never read a current certificate as evidence the whole machine is sound. The certificates certify their own scope; the PUWER record is where everything else lives, which is why the machine with four clean certificates can still be carrying the defect that stops it.

Building the defect system from a standing start

If defects on your site currently live in memory, verbal handovers and the fitter's notebook, building the system is a fortnight's work, not a transformation programme, and the defect handling improves the day the first page exists. The sequence matters more than the software.

The whole structure exists to answer four questions quickly: what did you know, when, what did you do, and who confirmed it. Every element above is one of those answers, prepared in advance.