A worked example rather than a named client. It describes how a lapsed façade access programme is recovered, drawn from over 26 years of lifting equipment engineering experience including BMU and cradle work.
Typical scope: four to eight cradle or BMU units on a single tower.
Façade access equipment is the most reliably neglected lifting plant on a commercial building, for the simple reason that nobody sees it. It sits on the roof, it is used by a contractor rather than by the building's own staff, and responsibility for it falls between the managing agent, the FM provider and the window cleaning contractor. A change of FM provider is the classic trigger: the outgoing provider stops arranging examinations, the incoming one assumes it is in hand, and six or twelve months pass before anyone establishes that the units have lapsed — often when a cleaning contractor refuses to use them.
Recovery starts with establishing what is actually up there and what paperwork exists for it, which on an inherited estate is frequently less than expected. Each unit is examined on a priority cycle, with the structure, the suspension ropes, the anchorages and the traversing arrangement treated as one system rather than as separate items. Where records are missing entirely, the examination establishes the present condition and the programme restarts from that date rather than from a date nobody can evidence.
What the building ends up with is every unit examined and back on a six-monthly cycle running from a date that can be evidenced, a clear record of which party arranges what, and reporting that reaches the managing agent rather than stopping with the cleaning contractor.
Why façade access lapses more often than anything else
Every other piece of lifting equipment in a commercial building has somebody who notices when it stops. A passenger lift generates complaints within the hour. A BMU can sit unused for months without anyone in the building being aware, and the people who do use it are a contractor on site a few times a year. Add a split between the managing agent who owns the asset, the FM provider who holds the contract and the cleaning contractor who operates it, and the result is a piece of equipment that carries people over the edge of a tower with nobody clearly accountable for its statutory examination.
The roof is the hard part, not the examination
Getting to façade access equipment safely is a job in itself. It means roof access permits, fall protection, often a confined or restricted working position, and weather that will cancel the visit at short notice regardless of what the diary says. A realistic programme builds in the possibility of a postponed visit rather than treating the date as fixed, because the alternative is an examiner working on a roof in conditions they should have walked away from.
What gets examined on a cradle system
The whole load path, from the building outwards: the anchorages and the structure carrying the unit, the davit or jib arrangement, the traversing gear and its track, the suspension and secondary ropes with particular attention to terminations, the hoists and the secondary safety device, and the cradle itself along with its controls and the means of raising an alarm from it. The secondary system matters disproportionately, because on façade access it is the thing standing between a primary failure and a fatality, and it is also the thing most easily assumed to be working because it has never been needed.
Restarting a cycle you cannot evidence
Where previous reports are missing, the honest position is that the equipment has no demonstrable examination history, and the programme restarts from the present examination rather than from an assumed earlier date. That is uncomfortable for a managing agent inheriting a building, but it is the only defensible answer: a cycle backdated to a report nobody can produce is worse than no cycle at all, because it looks like compliance while providing none.