Perimeter hoarding is the solid barrier around a construction site, and it earns its place on the drawings twice over. It keeps the public out of a place that can kill them, and it keeps the site's risks — falling material, plant movements, excavations — from reaching the pavement.
The legal position
The duty is not optional and it is not generic "best practice". The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 require construction sites to be secured against unauthorised access, so far as is reasonably practicable, and the principal contractor owns that duty on a multi-contractor project. HSE's guidance on protecting the public, HSG151, is the reference most principal contractors work to when they decide what the boundary treatment must be.
What "secured" means depends on where the site sits. HSE's own position is blunt about context: a rural compound behind stock fencing and a city-centre site beside a school gate are different problems. In an urban setting with pedestrians against the boundary, solid hoarding is the normal answer, and children are the test case the law keeps in mind — a site is an attraction to a child, and courts have treated it that way for decades.
What a principal contractor actually specifies
A hoarding line looks simple and is specified in more detail than most people expect:
- Height and construction — commonly specified at 2.4 metres, solid-boarded, no footholds or gaps
- A temporary works design. Hoarding is a structure with wind load on it. On anything beyond a garden fence, the layout, posts and foundations get designed and checked as temporary works, and re-checked if signage, netting or banners are added later — extra sail area changes the loading
- Gates that match the wall — the same height and security as the run of hoarding, opening inward or sliding, with segregated pedestrian access
- A licence, where it matters — hoarding that stands on the public highway needs a hoarding licence from the local authority before it goes up, with the council's conditions on lighting and maintenance attached
- Lighting and visibility where the public passes at night
Why there is an inspection record
Hoarding is put up once and then lives on a live boundary for the whole job. Panels get struck by deliveries, gates sag, ground softens around posts, someone bolts a banner to it. The document trail — an erection RAMS for the crews putting it up, then a recurring inspection record for the standing hoarding — exists because "it was fine when we built it" is not a defence on the day a panel goes over in the wind.
From the approving side of the desk, the hoarding paperwork is one of the first things checked on a new site, for a simple reason: it is the one control that protects people who never agreed to be near construction work at all.