PTW systems are useful where strict controls, sequences and methods have to be applied to particular tasks and activities.
What does your Client's PTW system add to the Safe System of Work here? What would suffer if this process was omitted?
(in other words, is this really a Permit to Work system?)

Certainly sounds daft. To my mind there is no point running a permit if one person is remote to the scene. The only exception would be high voltage / rail networks where a lock off has to be applied at a central point.

Also, who is signing the permit at this office? Walk away if it is the receptionist, security guard or someone simply signing a piece of paper for the sake of it.

If the client will not budge then you could perhaps compromise with a telephone authorised permit. Again, these add little to the process but it might satisfy the client's employee who can tick the box to say all his contractors work to permit systems and allow you to get on with the job.

Telephone permits.

Note - I do not condone these in any shape or form and regard them as a complete waste of time. I have no direct experience or implementing or operating such a permit. However, I have spoken to a couple of folks who have had to work under them, one on HV lines, the other was a geotech carrying out bore hole drilling. Both complained about the permit systems.

As I understand it, the contractor would arrive on site and set up (pedestrian barriers, signage etc) and then ring a central contact. The contact would then run through a checklist essentially asking what controls were in place and then, on being satisfied with the answers, would issue the OK for the permiet with a unique reference number. The contractor records the number on the permit and proceeds with the job.

Unfortunately in each case the client tasked an office junior with managing the scheme and unless certain magic phrases were given, they would not authorise the permit. The usual sticking point was "risk assessment" - the office junior needed to hear "site specific risk assessment".

Anyway, I only mention this because it sounds like the client wants to feel they are controlling the work, without getting out of the office to visit the site. Results in a slowdown in work for you. A telephone scheme, if kept simple, might offer a possible solution.

When you have seen a number of dead bodies that have resulted from the failure to work to the PTW and have had to visit their wives and children afterwards, as I have, you would think that we should all work in high risk controllable work situations via permits - I do

That said a PTW should be suitable and sufficiant for the work in hand noting that it is death not a bit of inconvenience that we should be managing!

There are many kinds of PTW systems one of which can be an individual PTW that allows for a number of days working where staff do not have to keep coming and going but sign it each time work starts and each time the work has finished [telephone systens can also work] - I would not say that self issuing PTW are the best but they can go a long way to managing a situation especially to providing a defence in a court

Competence: The point of a good PTW; managed by competent people and not office juniors etc; is to remove that one slip a competent person may make

Method statements + monitoring: Without good MS & monitoring systems then even a good PTW will fail

My advice is to adequately risk assess and devise a PTW system from that which manages death as the primary objective and inconvenience thereafter as the problem we have is that where people have worked to one standard and then are asked to work to another standard higher standard they all complain without giving it a chance

I may be wrong, gosh I have been before, but a PTW is a legal document. It cannot be issued or generated by you for your own operation. The idea is that the issuer and reciever ( different people with different interests and knowledge communicate and agree a safe way of working high risk tasks.

Bob, ..............

Wizard