Services & Products
If you are responsible for the safe operation of lifts or hoists at work, which are used by either employees or members of the public, you have a legal duty to ensure the equipment is thoroughly examined by a competent person at regular intervals and inspected. A thorough examination should include the following:
As the facilities manager or building supervisor, you automatically become the duty holder and you are legally responsible to ensure:
A competent person is someone who has sufficient technical and practical knowledge of the lift to be able to detect any defects and assess how significant they are. It is also important that the competent person is sufficiently independent and impartial to allow them to make an objective assessment of the lift. For this reason, it is not advisable for the same person who performs routine maintenance to carry out the thorough examination, as they are then responsible for assessing their own work.
It is unlikely that the required competencies will already be available in house, the Health and Safety Executive and Insurance companies recommend an accredited inspection organisation such as Pickerings.
The competent person is legally required to send you a written and signed report of the thorough examination as soon as practicable. This should normally be within 28 days, but if there is a serious defect which needs to be addressed you should expect to receive the report much sooner.
If the competent person identifies a defect which presents an ‘existing or imminent risk of serious personal injury’ they are also legally required to send a copy of the report to the enforcing authority. By law, the report must contain certain information, specified in Schedule 1 of LOLER. In summary, it should:
If the report does not contain all of the information above, you should not accept it, as this may place you in breach of the law. Try to resolve the matter with the competent person, but if this is unsuccessful you should contact your local enforcing authority for advice.
You are legally required to ensure that reports of thorough examinations are kept available for consideration by Health and Safety Inspectors for at least two years or until the next report, whichever is longer. They may be kept electronically as long as you can provide a written report if necessary.
If you have chosen to have your lift examined according to an examination scheme, you must ensure that you can produce a written scheme for inspection if necessary. If you cannot, an inspector will assume that the lift is being examined at statutory intervals.
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