Crane and lifting training requirements in New Zealand

No. Unlike Australia, New Zealand has no high-risk work licence for crane operation and no government body issues a crane operator’s licence. What both HSWA 2015 and the PECPR Regulations require is that people operating plant are competent. The Approved Code of Practice for Cranes puts the obligation squarely on the employer: controllers and employers should be able to provide evidence that their crane operators have the skills, knowledge and experience necessary to operate safely. In practice that means an operator’s certificate and documented assessment, because principals increasingly demand proof before allowing anyone on site.

Yes, and this is a requirement frequently missed. Under the PECPR Regulations 1999, a crane must have a certificate of inspection before it can be used. This isn’t guidance or good practice; the inspection bodies have been explicitly advised of it, and the Code of Practice sets out the requirements for obtaining one for each crane type, including a dedicated part for vehicle-mounted truck loader cranes covering both knuckleboom and telescopic boom machines. A competent operator on an uncertified crane is still a compliance failure.

They’re not the same thing, and confusing them is common. A certificate of competence under the PECPR Regulations is held by crane inspectors, issued by the Certification Board for Inspection Personnel as WorkSafe’s recognised qualification issuing agency, and it authorises someone to inspect and certify cranes. An operator’s certificate records that an operator has been trained and assessed on a crane type. If someone tells you your operators need certificates of competence, they’ve confused the inspection regime with the operating one.

No. Crane operators are encouraged to hold unit standard 30072, demonstrate and apply knowledge of slinging regular loads safely, and there are standards for other cranes (e.g. 3800 for bridge/gantry cranes). None is a legal requirement. They’re worth holding when a client or principal specifies them, and they’re useful evidence of competence, but the legal test remains whether the operator is actually competent and whether you can show it.

It covers slinging regular loads safely: selecting and inspecting lifting gear, calculating load weight, attaching the load, understanding sling angles and their effect on capacity, and directing the lift. This is the role the Crane Code calls a dogman: a person qualified to sling loads and direct the lifting and placing operations of a crane. It matters because a large share of lifting incidents are rigging failures rather than crane failures, and because the person on the ground attaching the load often isn’t the person who’s been trained. If you have crane operators but nobody trained in slinging, that’s the gap.

No. The Code of Practice covers at least nine distinct crane types and the differences are substantial: a gantry crane operator working from a pendant control in a workshop and a truck loader crane operator setting outriggers on a building site are doing different jobs with different failure modes. Operators need training and assessment for each type they use, plus familiarisation on each specific machine, because load charts, control layouts and stability characteristics vary by manufacturer and model.

It depends which machine you mean, and two very different machines share the name. A sideloader forklift has its mast and forks mounted on the side of the machine for handling long loads like timber, steel and pipe in narrow aisles. That’s a powered industrial lift truck and the forklift Code applies. A side lifter, also called a sidelifter or Swinglift and built by manufacturers including Hammar, Swinglift and Steelbro, is a truck or trailer-mounted container crane that lifts a shipping container from the side on two hydraulic lifting arms. That’s a crane: it lifts a suspended load, so the crane rules apply and the machine needs a certificate of inspection. Getting the two confused means training against the wrong standard and, worse, assuming a crane doesn’t need certification.

When you use it to lift a suspended load. The Approved Code of Practice for Cranes explicitly extends to forklift trucks, earthmoving equipment, material handlers and forestry equipment when they’re being used as a crane. That’s a significant point for anyone slinging a load off forklift tynes or lifting with an excavator: the crane rules come with it, including load charts, rated lift points and slinging competence. It’s also the most common way businesses find themselves operating a crane without realising they’re doing it.

Driving the truck requires the appropriate licence class for the vehicle’s weight, usually class 2 or above. Operating the crane mounted on it requires competence under health and safety law, not a licence class. So an operator can be perfectly licensed to drive the truck and completely unqualified to operate the crane on the back of it, or the reverse. Both need to be covered, and they’re assessed by different systems.

Most do. There’s no requirement for mobile crane drivers to keep a driver work time logbook, but truck loader crane operators are generally driving a goods vehicle, which brings work time and logbook rules into play. If you’re unsure whether your operation is covered, recording hours anyway is the safer position, because the consequence of getting it wrong is infringements against the driver and the operator licence.

Operators doing unit standards will also need to keep evidence of hours and lifts to support their unit standard assessment.

The Code of Practice doesn’t set a refresher interval in the way the forklift Code and the MEWP guidelines do. Three years is the industry convention and a defensible position, but it’s convention rather than a rule you can point at. Two things do have hard dates: the crane’s certificate of inspection, which has to stay current, and any unit standards or site-specific requirements your principals impose. Set your operator refresher cycle on how often people lift, what they lift and your own incident record, and document why you chose it.

Fifteen under regulation 46 of the Health and Safety at Work (General Risk and Workplace Management) Regulations 2016, which prohibits anyone under 15 from working at or with machinery. Crane work generally sits well above that in practice, because the competence requirement, the driving licence needed for a truck loader crane, and most site induction rules all set a higher bar.

Only in a properly designed and certified crane cage or work platform, and it’s the crane rules that govern it rather than the elevating work platform guidelines. WorkSafe’s MEWP guidance specifically excludes crane-suspended cages and platforms and refers them back to the Crane Code. Lifting people is a last resort where no elevating work platform or scaffold is practicable, and it needs a documented lift plan, a purpose-built certified cage and a properly trained operator and dogman.