PSSR records: alongside the written scheme, never in place of it

What PSSR asks, in plain terms

The Pressure Systems Safety Regulations 2000 apply across Great Britain to systems containing relevant fluids — steam, pressurised gases and the rest. Strip the schedule detail away and the shape is clear. There must be a written scheme of examination, drawn up or certified by a competent person, covering the vessels, protective devices and specified pipework. Examinations must actually happen at the scheme's intervals, and their reports kept. The system's safe operating limits must be established, and the system must not be operated beyond them. It must be properly maintained, operated by people with adequate instructions — and the records behind all of this must exist and be producible.

Most sites have the scheme and the examination reports under control, because the competent person drives that cycle. Where evidence habitually goes thin is everything between the examinations — which is exactly where the operating duties live.

Two kinds of looking — and the line between them

A pressure system gets looked at in two entirely different ways, and confusing them is the costliest mistake in this territory:

• The statutory examination — deep, credentialed, legally weighted. Done by the competent person, against the written scheme, at its intervals. This is the examination PSSR names, and nothing else counts as it.
• The everyday watch— frequent, light-touch, operational. The operator reading the gauge with the safe operating limit in view, glancing at the relief valve for weeps and tampering, flagging the trap that's started hammering. This is how the system is minded between examinations.

The two kinds of looking strengthen each other precisely because they stay separate. The examination gives the everyday watch its authority: limits established, devices proven. The everyday watch gives the examination its context: a year of readings and flags that tell the competent person what the system has actually been doing since they last saw it.

The records that matter

When someone asks — and someone eventually asks — the set looks like this:

• The written scheme itself, current, covering what it should — the competent person's document, held by the user.
• The last examination report for each item, and earlier ones where they matter — with any conditions or actions they imposed, and what was done about them.
• Safe operating limits, established and visible to the people operating the system, not filed in a cabinet.
• Operating instructions — adequate, current, and matching what operators actually do.
• Maintenance records — the system properly maintained, and provably so.
• The everyday operating evidence— the readings, checks and flags between examinations. The least mandated of the set, and the one that does the most work when something goes wrong, because it's the only record of how the system was actually run.

What good looks like between examinations

The everyday watch produces worthwhile evidence when a few properties hold. The readings are taken where the limit is known — the operator judges what they see against the established limit, and the record preserves both the reading and the judgement. The protective devices get eyes on them: not examined, which is the competent person's word, but looked at— weeps, seals, tampering, damage. Flags go somewhere visible rather than into a margin. And the gaps show: a watch that quietly stopped for three weeks should look like exactly that, because the competent person reading a year of history needs to know which silences mean “all well” and which mean “nobody looked”.

None of this requires any particular technology — a disciplined paper log can hold these properties, at growing cost in effort. The properties are the point, whatever holds them.

Questions to expect

From an inspector, a surveyor, or the competent person arriving for the next examination:

• “Show me the written scheme and the last report for this vessel — and what you did about the report's conditions.”
• “What are the safe operating limits here — and does the operator at the panel know them?”
• “Show me the operating checks on this system since the last examination.”
• “This relief valve passed examination in March. Who has looked at it since, and what did they see?”
• “Has this system ever been run outside its limits — and how would your records show it if it had?”

That last question is the one worth sitting with. A record that could never show an excursion isn't evidence the system stayed within limits — it's evidence that nobody would know.

Straight talk