Home / Sectors / Training and evidence for goods in and goods out sites
A lorry reverses onto a bay while someone on foot is crossing the yard. Whoever is nearest jumps on the forklift to unload it. No marshal, no reversing signals, nothing written down. That is the everyday risk on any site where goods vehicles arrive and leave, and it is where most of PHW's training and packs for this trade are aimed.
Not just haulage firms. Any site with lorries in and out.
This is aimed at firms that supply major manufacturers and the wider network of small sites around a big industrial estate: subassembly, powder coating, shot blasting and painting, machining and fabrication, steel stockholding, receiving and warehousing, container de-stuffing and just-in-time deliveries. Each of these sites can see twenty or more lorries a day, from 3.5 to 44 tonnes, offloaded by forklift and reloaded once the work is done. Loads arrive in stillages, pallets, cages or loose: raw steel, glass, seats, wheels, tyres, harnesses, counterweights and rams.
The same risk sits at a commercial laundry where vehicles reverse onto a bay with roll cages, at a bakery, and at quarries and stone yards moving material by the lorry-load.
In your own terms, not a generic hazard list.
Lorries reversing onto a bay and forklifts working the same ground as people on foot is the core risk. The common gap in small firms is that anybody jumps on the forklift and anybody reverses a lorry off the road onto the bay, with no marshalling and no reversing signals in place.
Offloading and reloading by forklift, and loads handled in stillages, pallets, cages or loose, needs an assessed, authorised operator and a documented loading bay procedure, not whoever is free at the time.
Overhead gantry cranes and chain hoists used to suspend heavy items, for example moving parts through shot blasting and painting, need a trained slinger/signaller and a competent crane operator behind every lift.
The single biggest gap on these sites is that none of it is written down: no traffic management plan, no safe system of work for the yard, and no record of who is authorised to be on the forklift or crane.
Named, not paraphrased into a claim.
The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, regulation 17, require a safe layout for vehicle and pedestrian traffic wherever they share the same ground.
PUWER 1998 regulation 9 places the duty to train and assess operator competence on the employer, covering the forklift and any overhead crane or chain hoist alike.
Where an overhead crane or chain hoist lifts, LOLER 1998 and its Approved Code of Practice L113 apply, requiring thorough examination at set intervals.
The Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992 cover loading and unloading by hand.
The employer still authorises each operator or member of staff in writing; PHW's certificates, records and packs are the evidence the employer relies on for that decision, not a substitute for it.
The machines, packs and systems that fit this trade.
The evidence trail a site, a customer's auditor or an insurer can check.
How verification works → · Take the 1-minute goods in and out check →
Tell us the machines, the pack, and the numbers, and we will come back with a price and dates.
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