What an ITP actually is
Strip away the formatting and an ITP is a table with one row per check. Each row answers five questions: what is being checked, what it is checked against, what counts as a pass, who signs it, and what record comes out the other end. Everything else on the sheet is a header.
The order of the rows is the order of the work. That is what makes an ITP different from a checklist you could fill in at any time. It follows the build sequence, so it tells you not just what gets checked but when it is too late to check it.
The name moves about. You will see inspection test plan, inspection and test plan, quality control plan, or just inspection plan, and on a big job the whole set may be bound into the project quality plan. They are the same animal. Ask which document the client means before you write anything, because the word on the form is rarely the word your firm uses.
| Activity | Reinforced concrete pad foundation, grid B4 |
|---|---|
| Checked against | Structural drawing 1042 revision C, and the specification clause covering reinforcement cover and cube testing |
| The check | Bar size, spacing and cover measured on the finished cage, before any concrete is ordered |
| Acceptance criteria | Cover 40mm minimum, bar size and spacing as drawn, no contamination on the starter bars |
| Point type | Hold point. Nothing is poured until it has been signed |
| Who signs | Our site engineer first, then the client's engineer |
| Record produced | Signed pre-pour check sheet, plus dated photographs of the cage |
| The next point | Cube results at 7 and 28 days, which is a test record rather than an inspection, and often the row people forget to put in |
Hold points, witness points, and the notice that costs money
Most of an ITP is ordinary checking. The two rows that change how a job runs are the hold point and the witness point, and the difference between them is worth being clear about, because getting it wrong costs either time or entitlement.
- Hold point
- Work stops. Nothing goes past it until the named person has checked it and signed. Pouring concrete over unchecked reinforcement is the classic breach, because once it is covered the only way to prove it was right is to break it out.
- Witness point
- You must give notice, usually a set number of days written into the contract. If they turn up, they watch. If they do not, you carry on. The obligation is the notice, not their attendance, and that distinction is the whole point of the row.
- Review point
- Somebody reviews a document rather than the work. A mix design, a welder qualification or a test certificate, checked at a desk before the material arrives.
- Acceptance criteria
- The line the check is measured against, written as a number or a named standard. Without one a check is an opinion, and two people can look at the same work and disagree in good faith.
- Non-conformance
- What gets raised when a check fails, often shortened to NCR. It records what was wrong, what was done about it, and who accepted the fix. A failed check with nowhere to go is how a hold point quietly becomes a signature.
- Inspection and test checklist
- Shortened to ITC. The form filled in on the day. The ITP is the plan, the ITC is the record it produces, and plenty of clients use the two words for the same sheet.
- Lot
- A defined parcel of work the plan applies to, common in civils. A lot might be one bay, one pour, or a hundred metres of pipe, and it is what stops a single sign-off covering a fortnight of work.
The practical trap is the notice period on witness points. Give three days' notice when the contract says five and you have not discharged the obligation, whether or not anybody was ever going to attend. Put the notice period in the row itself rather than leaving it in the contract, so the person on site can see it without ringing the office.
Who actually asks for one
This is the part most guides skip, and it is the question a firm actually has. ITPs feel universal when you read about them, and they are not. We measured it rather than guessing: we took 120 UK public tender packs at random and read every document in them, 1,612 documents in all.
So an ITP is not something a council refurbishment tender usually wants. What that number hides is where the demand really comes from, and it is almost always flowing down onto you from somebody else's system rather than arriving in a public advert.
Four regimes account for most of it. Under NEC contracts, core clause 40 requires the contractor to operate a quality management system and to submit a quality policy statement and a quality plan for acceptance, and the ITPs live inside that. On highways work, National Highways makes sector scheme registration mandatory through the Specification for Highway Works, and the specification sets its own hold points. Structural concrete built to BS EN 13670 carries execution classes, and the inspection required rises with the class. Defence work runs on its own quality plan standards again.
The pattern underneath all four is the same: you get asked for an ITP because of the system the job is being built under, not because of the size of your firm. A two-man specialist welding outfit on a bridge will produce one. A twenty-man builder doing school refurbishments may go years without seeing the term.
It is worth knowing that quality is not a small part of the score either. Across 1,009 tenders where we could read the evaluation split, the median weighting on quality was 40 per cent, and four in five put it at 30 per cent or more. The submission and the site records are two different things, but they are judged by people who assume a firm that can do one can do the other.
Where the rows come from
The single biggest difference between an ITP that helps and one that sits in a folder is where the rows came from. A borrowed template carries somebody else's job. Rows taken from your own scope of works carry yours.
Start from the work, not a template
List the activities the job is actually made of. The plan follows the scope of works, so a job with nine activities has nine groups of rows, not forty inherited from a project nobody on your site has seen.
Find what each activity is checked against
Go to the specification and the drawings and pull out the clause or the drawing number. This is the slow part, and it is the part that makes the plan yours. A row with no reference is a row nobody can argue from when it matters.
Decide what is worth stopping the job for
Hold points cost time, so put them where the evidence disappears: anything covered up, buried, poured over, backfilled or sealed. Everything else is a witness point or a review point. A plan with a hold point on every row will be ignored by the second week.
Name the record each point produces
A signed sheet, a test certificate, a photograph, a delivery ticket, a calibration record. If a point produces nothing, then as far as anyone reading the file in two years is concerned it did not happen.
Get it agreed before you start
An ITP submitted after the work has begun is paperwork. Agreed beforehand, it is the document that ends an argument months later about whether the client was told, because they signed the plan that said they would be.
Commissioning and test records
Sitting alongside the ITP is a family of records that get asked for far more often, and they are the same shape underneath. A commissioning certificate, a drainage air test, a pipeline pressure test, a concrete cube result: each one is a criterion, a measured result, a pass or a fail, and a signature.
That is why they belong in the same plan rather than in a separate pile. The only real difference from an ordinary inspection is that the answer is a number rather than a judgement, which is also what makes them hard to argue with later.
In our sample these appeared in nearly a quarter of tender packs, ten times as often as ITPs did, and they cluster heavily in building services. If your work involves anything that gets switched on, filled, pressurised or balanced at the end, the commissioning records are the paperwork most likely to hold up your final account.
Where they go wrong on site
Almost every ITP failure is one of five things, and none of them is about the format of the sheet.
- The borrowed template
- Rows referencing clauses that are not in your specification and stages your job does not have. Everybody can tell, including the client reviewing it.
- The hold point nobody told the gang about
- The plan is agreed in the office and lives in a folder. The pour goes ahead on a Friday because the concrete was booked. The plan has to reach the people doing the work or it is decoration.
- Late notice on a witness point
- The check happened, the work was fine, and the obligation still was not met because the notice was short. This one is pure paperwork and pure cost.
- Signatures with no name
- An illegible initial and no date. Two years on in a dispute, an unattributed signature is worth very little.
- The plan that is never opened again
- Agreed at the start, filed, and next looked at during handover, when a dozen points have gone by unrecorded and there is nothing left to photograph.
The common thread is that an ITP is only worth anything if it is used at the workface on the day. That is a working practice question rather than a document question, and it is the reason the best plans are short, specific, and written by somebody who knows what order the job goes in.
Questions people ask
- What does ITP stand for in construction?
- Inspection and test plan. You will also see it written as inspection test plan, and the same document called a quality control plan or an inspection plan depending on who drafted the contract.
- Is an inspection and test plan a legal requirement?
- No. There is no UK law that requires one. What requires an ITP is a contract, a specification, or a standard the job is being built to, which is why two firms of the same size can have completely different answers. If nobody has asked you for one, you do not need one.
- Who prepares the ITP?
- Usually the contractor doing the work, because they are the ones who know the sequence. The client, their engineer or the main contractor then reviews and accepts it. On specialist packages the subcontractor writes their own and it is folded into the main plan.
- What is the difference between an ITP and an ITC?
- The ITP is the plan and the ITC, an inspection and test checklist, is the form filled in on the day. One says what will be checked, the other records that it was. Plenty of firms use a single document for both, and plenty of clients use the two names interchangeably.
- What is the difference between a hold point and a witness point?
- Work stops at a hold point until it has been signed off. At a witness point you give the notice the contract asks for, and if nobody attends you carry on. The obligation at a witness point is giving the notice, not their turning up.
- What happens if a hold point is missed?
- It depends who finds out and when. At best the work is opened up and checked again. At worst the client will not accept that section, and the argument becomes whether to break out something you have already built. That is exactly why hold points belong where the evidence gets covered up.
- How long should an inspection and test plan be?
- As long as the job has stages worth checking. A small package might be one page and eight rows. A structure with concrete, steel and drainage will run to several pages, because each trade has its own sequence and its own points.