Ox Scaffold Ltd are an Oxfordshire based scaffold contractor.

Who we are, and where we work from

Ox Scaffold Ltd is a scaffolding contractor based at Enslow Wharf, on Station Road just off the A4095 between Kidlington and Bletchingdon. We have been trading since June 2018, we are registered at Companies House as company 11396938 under SIC code 43991 — scaffold erection — and scaffolding is the only thing we do.

The yard matters more than it sounds. Almost every scaffolding firm claims to cover Oxfordshire; what separates them is how far the lorry has to come when you need an extra lift, or when the roofer opens something up and finds a problem that changes the job. From Enslow we are ten minutes from Oxford, ten from Bicester, fifteen from Witney and twenty from Banbury. At that range a revisit is an hour of our day. At twenty-five miles it is a chargeable half-day, which is why firms that far out quietly decline to come back.

What we put up

• Domestic — extensions, loft conversions, re-roofs, chimney work, rendering, repointing, replacement windows and solar installations. Most of what we do.
• Commercial — shops, offices, pubs, schools and churches, usually with the building still open underneath and the public to be protected.
• Industrial — plant, warehousing and process buildings, where the constraint is normally that production cannot stop while we are there.
• Temporary roofs — weather protection spanning up to 40 metres, craned in or run on a rolling track so the building below stays dry through the winter.
• Events and media — stages, camera platforms, grandstands and temporary demountable structures.

The standards we actually work to

Scaffolding is one of the more heavily regulated trades in construction, and it is worth knowing what a contractor is claiming when they list initials on a website.

• TG20:21 is the NASC technical guidance for tube-and-fitting scaffolds. A scaffold that falls inside its scope should come with a TG20 compliance sheet. Anything outside it — unusual geometry, heavy loading, a temporary roof — needs a bespoke design from a scaffold engineer. If a quotation does not say which of the two you are getting, ask.
• SG4 is the NASC guidance on preventing falls while the scaffold is being built, taken down or altered. It governs how our own people work, not the finished structure.
• BS EN 12811-1 sets the duty classes. A class 2 inspection scaffold and a class 4 masonry scaffold look broadly similar from the pavement and are not remotely the same thing. This is the single most common reason two quotations differ by hundreds of pounds, and it is why the cheapest price is sometimes for a scaffold that will not carry your job.
• The Work at Height Regulations 2005 require a scaffold in use to be inspected at intervals not exceeding seven days, and again after anything likely to have affected its stability — high winds, an impact, or an alteration. The duty sits with whoever controls the work, which on a domestic job is usually the main contractor rather than the scaffolder.
• The Highways Act 1980, section 169 is why you need a licence to stand a scaffold on a public footpath or road. It comes from the highway authority, which is the county or unitary council, and it is normally what sets your start date rather than our availability.
• CDM 2015 applies to essentially all construction work, including domestic projects, where the duties pass to the contractor.

Our scaffolders are CISRS-qualified and CITB-trained, we are Advanced CHAS accredited, and we issue RAMS with a job-specific toolbox talk before anyone starts. More detail on all of this is on our scaffolding questions page.

What happens when you call

What actually drives the price

There is no honest per-metre rate for scaffolding, which is why nobody publishes one. What moves the number is: how much of it there is and how high; the duty class the work needs; how long you want it for, since the hire period is a real cost to us; whether it stands on your ground or on the public highway, which adds a council licence fee and sometimes a weekly renewal; how hard it is to get materials to the back of the building; and whether the design is standard or needs engineering.

A straightforward two-storey domestic re-roof is a different order of job from a temporary roof over a listed building in a conservation area, and anyone quoting both the same way is guessing at one of them. We would rather explain the number than defend it later.

Towns we cover

We have written a page for each of these, covering the local stock, the council you apply to and what tends to be awkward there:

Oxford · Bicester · Kidlington · Banbury · Witney · Abingdon · Didcot · Thame · Aylesbury · Buckingham · Milton Keynes · Bletchley · High Wycombe · South Buckinghamshire · Brackley · Northampton · Leighton Buzzard · Dunstable

Or go by county — Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire. If your town is not listed, ring us anyway; the list reflects where we have written a page, not the limit of where we go.