visitor book

If you are keeping visitors books, from a personal injuries claims perspective it may be worth retaining them for 4 years. Claimants (generally) have 3 years to make a claim and extra time for the Court processes (normally up to 6 months).
If you have destroyed your books after 2 years what evidence would you have the potential claimant was on-site on that day (or not). Particularly if they haven't reported an accident in the workplace and it is not registered in your accident book.

Kristen – This is a really interesting question!

To start with, it’s worth just restating the legal requirements to have a visitors’ book in the first place, before going on to look at how long you would need to keep one.

The Occupiers’ Liability Act 1957 and 1984 places a common law duty of care upon the occupier to take reasonable care to ensure that visitors will be reasonably safe in using the premises for the purposes for which they were invited or permitted to be there.(The 1984 Act creates an additional duty for occupiers to look after unlawful visitors too).

The two principal pieces of health and safety legislation are the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 (HSAW) and Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 (MHSWR) which, as you will be aware, place a responsibility on employers to look after people in their workplace. This duty (s.3) extends to cover persons not in the employer’s employment i.e. visitors, among other people.

There is no requirement in law to have a visitors’ book. However, in order to comply with responsibilities under occupiers and health and safety legislation it is necessary for an organisation to know who is on its premises at any given time, and the most obvious way to do this is by using a visitors’ book. That way, in the event of an emergency evacuation (such as a fire or bomb threat) the organisation should know who is present and can organise the evacuation safely, exercising its duty of care to visitors. It’s also a practical way of keeping non-invited guests off the premises, and a good way of proving to insurers that as an occupier you are in control of who is on your premises.

Interestingly, there is nothing really specific in the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order (RRFSO) relating to the keeping of visitor records, though they do require the responsible person to “take such general fire precautions” to ensure the safety of “relevant persons who are not [the duty holder’s] employees.” Note though that this includes people who are also “in the immediate vicinity of the premises and who [are] at risk from a fire on the premises” – not people who you would have in your visitors’ book anyway! So the RRFSO is of little use here.

Because there is no specific legal requirement to have a visitor’s book, there is no corresponding legal stipulation for how long such a book should be kept. The answer to this is likely to be found under the Data Protection Act 1988 (DPA), which sets out what data organisations can collect and how it should be stored etc.

Information collected in a visitors book is likely to be classed as “personal data” (but not “sensitive personal data”) under the DPA because it is data which has been collected and is stored in an organised way and is stored in a retrievable format. In practice, there is no real need to go through the rigmarole of making access to visitors’ book records part of an official data subject request. However, under the DPA the data controller has a responsibility to make information to anyone requesting data within 21 days of that request.

Under the DPA there is no quantified time period for which relevant information should be kept. One of its key principles states that: “Personal data processed for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.”

Given this last requirement, it would seem sensible to keep records (such as a visitors’ book) for as long as you need them, but no longer. You are likely to want them as a record of maintenance work, sales representatives and so on who visit your site, so that you can potentially contact them in connection with their visit, i.e. as follow up.

In practice, keeping visitors’ books much more than two years would not seem a good idea (unless there was a good reason to do so) – you might even think that holding on to them for longer than a year or 18 months would not be sensible.

Remember too to dispose of any old visitors’ books securely!

Kristen,

I don't believe that visitor books are a legal requirement, either to have them or to keep them for any specified period. However, please check with your insurance company. I know of one example where the insurers insisted on (a) a contractors' log, so they could check that contractors were correctly instructed in local site rules, H&S and First Aid policies etc, and that they carried their own PL insurance. (b) as an afterthought, the insurers also requested a visitor log. This is understandable, as the PL insurance covers visitors to the site.

Is there a legal requirement to keep old visitor sign in books on site for a length of time?