Can My Lift Company Carry Out the LOLER Inspection?

What do the regulations actually say?

LOLER 1998 Regulation 9 requires lifting equipment to be thoroughly examined by a competent person at the prescribed intervals. Regulation 10 and Schedule 1 then set out what the resulting report has to contain and when a serious defect has to be reported to the enforcing authority. What none of that does is name a prohibited person. There is no clause saying your lift maintenance company may not carry out the examination, and anyone who tells you it is outright illegal is overstating the position. The regulations define the duty and the standard, not the identity of whoever meets it. It is worth knowing that before you are sold anything on the strength of it, because a supplier who misstates the law to win work has told you something useful about themselves.

What does HSE actually expect of a competent person?

HSE guidance sets two tests, and most people only remember the first. The competent person needs practical and theoretical knowledge of the equipment sufficient to detect defects and judge how much they matter. They also need to be sufficiently independent and impartial that objective decisions can be made. That second test is not about qualifications at all. It asks whether the examiner is free to reach an inconvenient conclusion — and HSE guidance is explicit that someone assessing the adequacy of their own maintenance work is poorly placed to do so. The test is structural. It is about the position the examiner is standing in, not their character.

So is it illegal if my maintenance company does it?

No. It is not automatically unlawful, and it is important to be straight about that. Plenty of larger maintenance companies run a genuinely separated examination function, with its own reporting line, its own examiners and no commercial interest in the remedial work. Where that separation is real, the arrangement can be perfectly sound. The question is never what the company is called. It is whether the separation exists in practice or only on the letterhead.

But surely the company that maintains it knows it best?

This is the strongest argument for letting them do it, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a dismissal. It is true. The engineer who has attended that lift for six years knows its history, its quirks, which door operator has always been marginal and what the controller did last winter. That knowledge is genuinely valuable and an incoming examiner does not have it. But familiarity is not what Regulation 9 is testing for. A thorough examination exists to establish whether the equipment is safe to continue in use, independently of the people responsible for keeping it that way. Familiarity cuts both ways: the same engineer who knows the door operator has always been marginal is the person who decided, year after year, that marginal was acceptable. Fresh eyes are not a substitute for history, but history is not a substitute for fresh eyes either — and only one of the two is what HSE's impartiality test asks for.

Why is one company doing both awkward?

If the company that maintains your lift also examines it, the same organisation decides whether its own maintenance has been adequate, records any defect it finds, and then quotes to put that defect right. None of those three steps is improper on its own. Together they produce a position where a finding and a sales opportunity are the same document, and where under-reporting a defect quietly conceals a maintenance shortfall. Nobody has to act in bad faith for that to distort the outcome. It is the arrangement that creates the pressure, which is why the fix is structural rather than a matter of choosing a more honest supplier.

Does the conflict only work one way?

No, and assuming it does is a mistake. The obvious worry is the missed defect — the finding that would have embarrassed the maintenance team and somehow did not make the report. The opposite is just as real: an examiner whose employer sells the repair has every incentive to write up work that is not strictly required. Duty-holders who move to an independent examiner sometimes find their reports get shorter rather than longer, and are surprised by it. The underlying problem is the same in both directions. From the outside you cannot tell which way the pressure ran, and a report you cannot interrogate is not much of a safeguard.

What if it is already included in the maintenance contract?

This is the most common version of the question, and the phrase to listen for is that the examination is covered, included or thrown in. Statutory examination is not a maintenance deliverable; it is a separate legal duty that happens to be convenient to bundle. Before accepting that it is handled, establish the following:

1. Whether the contract actually names thorough examination under LOLER Regulation 9, or only refers to servicing, maintenance visits or safety checks.
2. Who performs it — a named examiner, or whichever engineer is on site that day.
3. Whether you receive a full report to Schedule 1, or a certificate confirming a pass.
4. What the stated interval is, and whether it matches the equipment. A passenger lift is six months, not twelve, because it carries people.
5. Whether declining the remedial quote changes anything about the examination you receive next time.

Is a certificate the same thing as a report?

It is not, and the difference matters more than almost anything else on this page. Schedule 1 of LOLER sets out what a report of thorough examination has to contain, including the equipment identified, the date of the examination, the safe working load, any defect that is or could become a danger, the repair required and by when, the date of the next examination, and the name and qualifications of the person making the report. A single-page certificate saying the lift passed is not that document. If what lands in your inbox is a pass rather than a report, you are missing the part that would tell you whether anything was found — and it is the part an inspector or an insurer will ask to see. Ask for the report every time, and read the defects section before the conclusion.

What should a duty-holder ask?

The table below gives the five questions worth asking and what the answers tend to sound like in each direction. None of them is confrontational and all of them are reasonable things for a duty-holder to want to know. If the answers are comfortable, the arrangement may well be sound and there is no reason to change it. If they are vague — particularly on who employs the examiner and who profits from the remedial work — that vagueness is itself the answer.

What should you do if the arrangement looks conflicted?

Finding that your examiner and your maintainer are the same organisation is not an emergency and does not mean the equipment is unsafe. It means one of your controls is weaker than you thought. A proportionate response:

1. Ask for the last two reports in full, not the certificates, and look at whether any defect has ever been recorded.
2. Check the examination intervals against the equipment class rather than against what the contract says.
3. Get the next examination done independently and compare the two reports side by side. One independent examination tells you more than any amount of asking.
4. If the independent report finds materially more than the previous ones did, treat that as information about the arrangement rather than about any individual.
5. Record the decision you reach either way, so that the reasoning exists in writing before anyone asks for it.

Where does the duty finally rest?

Wherever the examination comes from, the legal duty stays with you as the duty-holder. You cannot contract it away, and the competence of the person you appointed is part of what you are responsible for. If a lift injures someone and the report was produced by the company being paid to maintain it, an HSE or local authority inspector — and, separately, your insurer — will ask how you satisfied yourself the competent person was sufficiently impartial. That question is far easier to answer before it is asked than after. Being able to give a one-sentence answer is the practical reason most managed portfolios end up separating the two, well before anyone makes them.