I would think that electronic forms would be accepted in court. Any defence of training would be backed up by induction records, and the 'time served' by the employee in the company. The question in court I'd imagine would be not so much "what training was received by the employee?", but "was this training suitable and sufficient?"

If you're still unsure it may be worth keeping paper copies of the training records which cover the past three years, with the remainder scanned in.

What does anyone else think?

I'm not sure I fully agree, Penshaw. If an employee stated they didn't understand, or that they just signed because the boss told them to, the next question must be why they didn't raise this issue, or any other concerns they had regarding their competence levels.

Maybe that would happen in an ideal world?

By questionnaire I assume you mean validation test at the end of the course? Would a one-off observation be adequate? What if the one time the employee is observed is the only time they act in the correct manner?

Typo or what!! Spell check?

Thanks for your input all
I agree some sort of questionaire on the training forms would be benificial. But again this could be scanned into an electronic format and the paper copies disposed of.
Just trying to free up some valuable space in my office.

Electronic documents (meaning that the original is the electronic version) are accepted by criminal and civil courts across Europe and the USA, provided they can be demonstrably secure against fraud/alteration/etc. - we have several EN and ISO document standards to implement that, though the majority of UK law firms are using ISO-PDF/A. Keeping only a scan of a paper original is permitted with restrictions, depending on the law behind the bit of paper in question (some still refer to words such as "original copy", but not in the H&S sector).

Legally, however, the forms you're talking about have no standing. They don't prove competence, merely that someone signed something because they were told to. The records of attendance (time sheets, forms completed by the instructor, etc.) are what would be drawn upon if there was ever any argument over who was "competent" in what; and again these can be physical or electronic provided they are trustworthy.

If all your several-pages-long document says is "I, Joe Smith, have signed this document" then you can throw the lot away and just keep an Excel spreadsheet of names and dates - their signature is meaningless as they're not attesting to anything by applying it.