Hold points and witness points: who owns them and how they get missed

Every inspection and test plan carries four letters against each line: H, W, S and R. Everyone on site can tell you what they stand for. Far fewer can tell you who is allowed to release a hold, what happens when the notice is not given, or what record proves afterwards that a hold was honoured rather than talked past. This post is about the gap between the letters on the plan and what happens at half past three on a Friday when the concrete is on its way.

The four codes, and what each one commits you to

The code is set per party, not per line. A pre-pour inspection is commonly H for the contractor's own engineer, W for the principal contractor and S for the client. Each party's code is that party's decision, agreed before the plan is approved, and it is the reason we tell contractors to negotiate the codes before they issue an ITP rather than after: a plan that marks everything H for everyone is not thorough, it is a programme lever handed to the client.

Who owns a hold

A hold point belongs to the party whose letter it is. If the principal contractor's column says H at pre-energisation, then the principal contractor's named representative releases it, by attending and signing, and nobody else can do so on their behalf. The contractor's site manager cannot release it because the inspector was late. The client's engineer cannot release the principal contractor's hold, though they may hold their own. This sounds obvious written down and it is the thing most often fudged on site, usually by phone: "can we go ahead and you sign it Monday?" A signature on Monday for a hold released on Friday is a record of a hold that was not held, and an auditor reading the dates will see it.

ISO 9001:2015 clause 8.6 is the requirement behind all of this: planned arrangements to verify that requirements have been met, evidence of conformity, and traceability to the person who authorised release. The hold point is the planned arrangement, the signature is the authorisation, and the record is the evidence. Remove any one and the clause is not met.

Notice periods

The notice period is written on the ITP, typically 24 or 48 hours, and it cuts both ways. The contractor must give it, in a form that can be shown later: an email, an entry on a shared inspection request log, a numbered notice. In return the party holding the point must attend within it, or for a witness point, lose the right to complain that they were not there. Where the notice is given verbally, or given late, the protection disappears in both directions: the contractor cannot prove the invitation, and the client cannot prove they were denied it. We keep a single inspection request register per project, with the notice number, the ITP line, the date and time issued, the date and time the point was attended or the period expired, and the outcome. It is the record that settles most of the arguments before they start.

The holds that actually matter

Most packages have two or three genuine holds, and the rest are witness or surveillance. On a reinforced concrete element it is the pre-pour inspection, because once the concrete is placed the reinforcement can never be inspected again. On a distribution board it is the pre-energisation inspection and the test results before the board is put into service. On a service void it is the pre-close-up, before the ceiling or the boxing goes on. On temporary works it is the permit to load and the permit to strike, which under BS 5975-1:2024 are the temporary works coordinator's to issue and nobody else's. Choose those, defend them, and let the rest be witness points with a notice period. A plan with fourteen holds gets bypassed precisely because nobody can honour fourteen.

How holds get missed

In our experience they are rarely ignored outright. They are missed in one of a handful of ordinary ways.

1. The notice was never issued. The engineer meant to email on Wednesday, the pour was booked for Friday, and by Thursday it was too late to give 48 hours. The point quietly becomes a witness point that nobody witnessed.
2. The hold is on the ITP but not on the programme. The planner has the pour on Friday morning; the ITP needs an inspection on Thursday afternoon that is on nobody's programme. The two documents were never reconciled.
3. The subcontractor does not hold the approved ITP. They are working to their own check sheet, which has no hold point on it, because the approved plan is in the contractor's document control and never reached the gang.
4. The check sheet is signed after the event. The work was covered, the sheet was filled in from memory, the photographs are of the finished surface. The record exists; the inspection did not.
5. The permit is treated as paperwork. The falsework is loaded before the permit to load is signed because the coordinator is on another site and the crane is booked. The permit is signed later "to tidy up".
6. The wrong party releases it. The site manager signs the client's column, or the client's inspector releases a point the contractor's own engineer should have signed first, so the order of checks is reversed.

None of these is a decision to skip an inspection. They are what happens when the plan lives in an office, the programme lives on site and nobody has put the two together.

The record that proves a hold was held

When the question is asked months later, by an auditor, a client's engineer or a claims consultant, the answer has to come from records that agree with each other. We look for five.

• The inspection request, numbered and dated, issued within the notice period, naming the ITP line.
• The check sheet for that line, with measured values rather than ticks, signed by the party whose hold it was, with the time as well as the date.
• The ITP line itself signed in the right column, so the plan and the sheet say the same thing.
• A photograph taken at the point of the inspection, before the work was covered, with its reference on the check sheet.
• The site diary entry for the day, which puts the inspection in sequence with the pour, the energisation or the close-up that followed it.

The sequence is the proof. If the pour record shows concrete placed at 09:00 and the pre-pour check sheet is signed at 14:00 the same day, the dates have answered the question and no explanation will help. If the request went out on Tuesday, the sheet was signed Thursday morning with the cover readings written in, the photograph shows the reinforcement and the diary says the pour started at 13:30, nobody needs to remember anything.

What we would change on most sites

Three things. Put every hold and witness point on the construction programme as an activity with a duration, so the planner sees it. Give the approved ITP and its check sheets to the subcontractor's supervisor, not just to document control, and brief the holds at the pre-start. Keep one inspection request register and make it the first thing the quality manager looks at each morning. The ITP templates in our M&E and civils libraries carry the four codes per party on every line with the notice period in the header, and the Activity Check Sheets behind them ask for measured values and the time of inspection, which is what makes the sequence provable. If you want to see how a plan reads with the holds chosen rather than sprayed, the ITP guide walks through a worked line.