The quarantine clock: your holding pen has a 14 working day limit
Every yard has the corner. The car that arrived with something wrong, the delivery that does not match what was agreed, the vehicle nobody has decided about yet. The Environment Agency has rules about that corner, and the one most yards do not know is that it has a clock on it.
Fourteen working days, and it is written down
The EA's appropriate measures for permitted ELV facilities are the standard your permit is inspected against, and they are direct about it: "Quarantine storage must be for a maximum of 14 working days." Longer is allowed only in limited and specific cases, and only where the EA agrees. A quarantine pen that quietly becomes long term storage is exactly what the rule exists to stop.
What the pen itself must be
Separate and labelled: "Quarantine storage must be separate from all other storage and clearly marked as a quarantine area." Sealed underneath: the offloading, reception, treatment and quarantine areas all need impermeable surfaces with sealed drainage, because an undepolluted vehicle is hazardous waste wherever it sits. And prohibited items pulled out of vehicles need isolating, with gas cylinders in locked cages.
What goes in it
The honest answer is anything you cannot yet treat as normal stock. A delivery that does not match the pre acceptance information, while you decide whether to accept it as non conforming or reject it. A vehicle with something unexpected inside. Anything prohibited that came out of the ELV stream. Quarantine is a decision buffer, not a storage category, which is why it has a deadline and general storage does not.
Counting the days
Working days, so weekends do not count. Fourteen working days from a Tuesday arrival is the Monday almost three weeks later. Bank holidays are the trap: the safe way to count is to treat them as working days, so your clock runs strict and you are early rather than late. However you count, the day a vehicle enters the pen is the day the clock starts, and the record should show both.
Where BreakerHQ fits today
Move a vehicle to quarantine in BreakerHQ and the clock starts on the record: the vehicle's page counts down the working days, turns red near the limit, says plainly when a stay has gone over, and the site register counts the pen at a glance. Leaving quarantine is one tap, and both taps are on the audit trail. The clock counts weekends out and bank holidays in, strict on purpose.