LOLER in one page

What LOLER covers

LOLER applies to all lifting equipment used at work, including passenger lifts in blocks of flats where staff (cleaners, concierge, contractors) attend the building. The full duty-by-duty walk-through is in the LOLER thorough examinations guide; the summary on this page is enough to know whether you are in scope.

It sits alongside PUWER, which covers the wider use of work equipment. Most lifts need both a LOLER thorough examination and a PUWER inspection regime — including commercial passenger lifts, platform lifts and workplace stairlifts.

Who does what

The duty holder arranges the examination, keeps the reports and acts on defects. The competent person carries out the examination independently of routine maintenance. Where a fault report leaves the lift out of service or flags a defect of imminent risk, the duty holder must act on it before returning the equipment to service.

Reports must be kept for the life of the equipment, or until the next report supersedes them for routine items. If you are unsure whether a landlord or a tenant should be commissioning the examination, see our guide on who pays for lift repairs.

Records, evidence and enforcement

A thorough examination produces a written report, and that report is the evidence that the duty was discharged. It must identify the equipment, state when the examination was carried out, describe any defect found, say whether that defect is an existing or an imminent risk to people, specify the repairs or safe working limits required, and give the date by which the next examination is due. A maintenance visit sheet is not a substitute for it, however detailed, because the two activities answer different questions: maintenance asks whether the lift is being looked after, examination asks whether it is currently safe to use.

Defects reported as an imminent risk carry the sharpest duty. The lift should be taken out of service immediately, the defect put right before it returns to use, and a copy of the report sent to the relevant enforcing authority by the competent person. For defects that are not imminent, the report sets a timescale, and quietly missing that timescale is the most common way a duty holder ends up in difficulty — not because a lift failed, but because the paper trail shows a known defect was left unaddressed.

Keep the examination reports, the maintenance log, the fault history and any repair invoices together in one place for the life of the equipment. Beyond compliance, that record is what turns a modernisation conversation from a sales pitch into an evidence-based decision: recurring faults on the same component, escalating callout frequency and lengthening parts lead times are all visible in the history long before a contractor points them out.

Running the duty in practice

In day-to-day terms the duty comes down to a calendar, a file and a decision process. The calendar carries the next examination date for every lift, set by the report or by the written scheme rather than by whoever booked the last visit. The file holds the examination reports, the maintenance records, the fault history and the repair invoices for the life of the equipment, in one place, retrievable by somebody other than the person who created it. The decision process says who acts when a report identifies a defect, within what timescale, and who signs off the return to service.

Where a managing agent runs several buildings, the failure mode is almost never a missed examination on a single lift — it is an inherited portfolio where nobody established which lifts are in scope, who the duty holder is on each site and where the historic reports went. Establishing that once, in writing, is cheaper than discovering it during an investigation, and it is the first thing an enforcing authority or an insurer will ask to see.

Budget for the outcome as well as the examination. A thorough examination is designed to find defects, so a proportion of reports will require work, sometimes urgently and sometimes on equipment that was performing perfectly well from a passenger's point of view. Treating that as an unwelcome surprise each time is how remedial work slips past its stated timescale; treating it as an expected part of running lifting equipment is how duty holders stay comfortably compliant.

How LOLER sits alongside other duties

LOLER never operates on its own. PUWER covers the wider selection, use, inspection and maintenance of work equipment, and a lift needs both: PUWER for the day-to-day regime that keeps it fit for use, LOLER for the periodic independent verification that it is safe. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act sits above both as the general duty, and the Equality Act adds a separate consideration in buildings where the lift forms part of an accessible route — an out-of-service platform lift or passenger lift is an access failure for disabled users as well as a maintenance item, and the alternative arrangement should be planned rather than improvised on the day.

Supply-side law matters too, though it lands on different shoulders. New passenger lifts are placed on the market under lift supply regulations and to standards in the EN 81 family, and platform lifts to their own machinery-based route. Those regimes govern how the equipment was designed, built and handed over; LOLER governs what happens for the decades afterwards. When a modernisation replaces controllers, drives or doors, both worlds meet, and the paperwork handed over at the end belongs in the same file as the examination reports.

For a duty holder the practical takeaway is simple: maintenance contract, thorough examination, accessibility plan and equipment documentation are four separate things, and having three of them is a gap rather than near-compliance. Establish once, in writing, which lifts are in scope, who the duty holder is on each site, who performs each role, and where the records live.

Common misreadings of the regulations

The most frequent mistake is assuming that a lift in a residential block is out of scope because the residents are not at work. Scope follows the working use of the equipment, not who owns the building: cleaners, concierge staff, carers, delivery drivers and contractors using the lift as part of their work are enough to bring it in, and in most managed blocks that is exactly what happens. The safe assumption for a managing agent is that the lift is in scope unless somebody competent has established otherwise in writing.

The second is treating the maintenance provider's engineer as the competent person by default. The competent person must be sufficiently independent and impartial to give an objective opinion, and an engineer examining the quality of maintenance their own employer performed is not in that position. Plenty of duty holders satisfy this by contracting examinations separately from maintenance, and insurers frequently require it.

The third is confusing the six-monthly interval with a fixed rule. Six months is the statutory default for equipment carrying people, but a written scheme of examination drawn up by a competent person can set shorter intervals for particular equipment or duty, and where such a scheme exists it is the scheme that governs. Equally, an examination is required after installation, after relocation, and following exceptional circumstances such as significant damage, a long period out of use or major modification.