If you manage a building with a passenger lift in the United Kingdom, the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998, better known as LOLER, sit at the centre of your statutory duties. The text of the regulations is short. The way they are interpreted, audited, and enforced is anything but.
This guide is for the people who actually carry the responsibility: property managers, facilities leads, building owners, and the duty holders who sign off the paperwork. We focus on the questions our engineers and compliance teams get asked most often, and the failures we see most often when a lift is taken to task during an enforcement visit, an insurance review, or a sale.
What LOLER actually requires
LOLER applies to any lifting equipment used at work. For our purposes that means passenger lifts, goods lifts, dumbwaiters, vehicle lifts, and the platform lifts you find in older residential blocks. The regulation hinges on a single phrase: a thorough examination by a competent person, at intervals specified by the regulations or by an examination scheme.
For passenger-carrying lifts, that interval is at least every six months. For goods-only lifts and most accessories, it is at least every twelve months. After any substantial repair, modernisation, or exceptional event such as a structural failure, an additional thorough examination is required before the lift returns to service.
The thorough examination is not the same as a routine maintenance visit. It is a systematic, often disassembly-led inspection of safety-critical components by a competent person who is independent of the day-to-day servicing of the equipment.
Who is the duty holder
The duty holder is the person or organisation with control of the lifting equipment. In practice that usually means the building owner or the managing agent acting on their behalf. The lift contractor is not the duty holder. Even if you outsource every aspect of compliance to a third party, the legal responsibility stays with the person who controls the equipment.
This matters because when something goes wrong, the Health and Safety Executive and any enforcing authority will look at who held the duty, not who held the keys to the motor room. Your contractor can support you, advise you, and execute the work. They cannot absorb the duty.
If you are not sure whether you are the duty holder, the easiest test is to ask who has the contract with the lift company. That person almost always is.
How often inspections must happen
The minimum frequencies are easy to remember:
- Every six months for passenger lifts and lifts carrying people.
- Every twelve months for goods-only lifts, dumbwaiters not designed to carry people, and most lifting accessories.
- After exceptional events such as a structural overload, a fall, a substantial repair, or significant modification.
- On a written scheme of examination if a competent person has drawn one up that specifies different intervals based on use, environment, or risk.
A common mistake is to treat six months as a guideline rather than a maximum. If your last thorough examination was on 1 January, the next one must happen on or before 1 July. There is no grace period built into LOLER, and there is no benefit of the doubt extended by enforcing authorities.
The three documentation failures we see most
In nearly every compliance review we run for a new client, the lifts are mechanically in better shape than the paperwork is. Three documentation failures account for the bulk of what we find.
1. The report exists, but the actions have not been closed out
A thorough examination produces a written report. If it identifies a defect that could become a danger to people, the competent person must notify the duty holder immediately and also the enforcing authority. Closing out those actions, with dates, evidence, and engineer sign-off, is part of the duty. A report in a drawer with three open items from eighteen months ago is not a sign of compliance. It is a sign of the opposite.
2. The competent person was not actually independent
If the company that maintains your lift is also providing the thorough examination, and the same engineer is signing both, you have a structural problem. The competent person needs to be independent of the day-to-day servicing arrangements to provide an objective opinion. Most reputable contractors, ourselves included, encourage clients to use a separate inspection body for LOLER.
3. The written scheme of examination does not match the equipment
If a written scheme was drawn up years ago and the lift has since been modernised, refurbished, or had its controller replaced, the scheme may no longer reflect the lift in front of you. Schemes need to be reviewed when the equipment changes, not just when the contractor changes.
What a competent person looks like
Competent person is a defined role under LOLER. They need theoretical knowledge of the equipment, practical experience of the type of lift in front of them, and the ability and independence to give an objective opinion. In the UK that usually means a lift inspector working for an accredited inspection body, often a member of the Safety Assessment Federation, with appropriate insurance and a written scope.
Asking for evidence of competence is reasonable and expected. If the response is defensive, that is a signal in itself.
LOLER and maintenance are not the same thing
A regularly serviced lift can still fail a thorough examination, and a lift that passes a thorough examination can still be a poorly maintained one. The two regimes are complementary, not interchangeable.
Maintenance is governed by the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998, known as PUWER, alongside the manufacturer's recommendations and the SFG20 schedules that most professional contractors work to. Its purpose is to keep the equipment in safe and reliable condition between examinations. The thorough examination, by contrast, is a periodic independent verification that the equipment is, on the day, safe to use.
If your contract bundles them together for convenience, that is fine. They still need to be performed separately, with separate sign-off, and ideally by separate parties.
What happens if you miss one
If a passenger lift is operated without a current thorough examination, you are operating it in breach of LOLER. Enforcement responses vary based on the situation, the harm caused, and the history of the duty holder. They range from a written improvement notice, requiring the lift to be brought into compliance within a specified period, to a prohibition notice taking the lift out of service, to prosecution where there has been an incident.
Insurance is also affected. Many building insurance policies require LOLER compliance as a condition of cover. A claim arising from a lift incident on equipment with an out-of-date thorough examination can be repudiated quickly.
A simple monthly cadence that keeps you safe
The strongest compliance posture is one that does not rely on memory. The duty holders we work with most successfully treat LOLER as a monthly habit, not a six-monthly panic.
- Set a recurring monthly review. Pull the last LOLER report, check the action list, and confirm any open items have been booked, completed, and signed off.
- Hold a single source of truth. One folder, one platform, one place where the reports, actions, certificates, and the written scheme live. Email threads are not a compliance system.
- Diary the next examination 30 days early. Booking on the day it is due is too late. Booking a month ahead gives slack for access, scheduling, and any pre-examination remedials.
- Review the written scheme when anything material changes. A new controller, a door operator change, a sling replacement, or a cab refurbishment all warrant a scheme review.
None of this is exotic. It is the difference between a lift portfolio that quietly stays compliant and one that surfaces unwelcome surprises every time a buyer's solicitor asks for the file.
Where Durant Lifts fits in
We do not act as the independent competent person for our own maintenance customers. That separation is part of how we keep the discipline honest. What we do is help our clients prepare for thorough examinations, close out actions quickly, and run their compliance documentation cleanly through Durant OS, our client platform, so the next time someone asks for the file, the answer is one click.
If you want a second opinion on your current LOLER posture, or you are taking over a portfolio and need to know what you are inheriting, we are happy to take a look.
Want a second pair of eyes on your LOLER file?
We offer a no-obligation LOLER readiness review for property managers in London, Kent and the South East. Send us the last two examination reports and we will tell you where the gaps are.
