Working in a Seveso11/ COMHA environment , we produce in excess of 25,000 permits per year- some with attachments, checklist, SPA's, Method statements, SDS etc- alot of paper.

Just looking for a quick response on retention policy elsewhere

Our current setup would be - no incident , permits retained locally for several weeks by Area Owner, centrally for couple of months after that, and then dumped. Method statements are retained for min 1 year, and may be longer by construction projects as part of Safety file.
In case of an incident( accident, near miss etc) they are filed as part of any investigation.

Electronic permits have been assessed and rejected.

Thanks

The retention period for every company I've worked for is 12 months. I don't know if this is the law or just company policy. If youre running out of shelf space then scan them onto a 500gb external hard drive. It will take a while to fill that up

Holding onto things in order to defend or resist claims becomes a bit unweildy. We had a recent claim going back to employment in 1966! For the HAVS issue, there should be an overarching R/A determining whether or not health surveillance is required. If it is, a clinical 'exit' appointment will sort things for you. No symptoms at exit = no claim.

Otherwise, I'm firmly of the opinion that a completed permit is a dead document and should be discarded - immediately. Neither are completed permits (generally) relevant to the Health and Safety File in any CDM context.
A copy of the odd one can be appended to incident reports arising.

"No symptoms at exit = no claim."

Not sure that would stand up in court!

What about lung diseases / cancers etc. that would not appear until much later, but still be cuased by exposures in the work place?

It would imagine it dependson what the task/ risk was.

If it was an electrical permit, if your company has defined guidance, keep it until the contract has ended and the defect period was over as a minimum.

One of our clients turned off trace heating and tried to blame us for £80k of damage to 2 pumps.
We looked back through permits and found that it was tested and energised on a certain day.
It provided enough ammo for us not to foot the bill.

Now if it was work on asbestos, you would want to keep the records for 40 years.