There's no legal requirement to keep them at all. Reasons for keeping them are to be available for an audit or an investigation. A few months would suffice for audit purposes. If an accident or other problem happened on the permit job, you might want to keep the permit for longer.

Hi Katie, I don't believe there is any specific legislative period of time you need to keep permits but we keep them stored for 3yrs, simply because individuals can make a claim up to 3yrs and if there was a claim in the occupational health side of things we can demonstrate the control methods we used. Steve

Katie All the previous posts are valid. We operate a permit system for some fairly large high voltage equipment. Our procedure states that we keep them for 7 years, fairly easy as they are electronically backed up. One reason is that, as previously mentioned on the thread, is that following an injury and subsequent claim the permit may be a discoverable document. Although 3 years is the time limit in which someone can claim, they could claim after 2 years and 11 months. This is just the start of a process that could then take 2 or 3 more years (deepening on the complexity of the case and if the defendant chooses to contest). So....Someone might be asking to see a permit 5 or 6 years after it was produced.