Does LOLER follow ownership or control?
LOLER places its duties on employers and on whoever has control of lifting equipment or of how it is used, to the extent of that control. That's not automatically whoever owns the freehold of the building it sits in. A landlord who owns a warehouse but has no involvement in how a tenant's forklifts are operated is not the duty-holder for those forklifts; the tenant operating them is.
Who is responsible for lifts in common areas?
In a multi-let residential block or mixed-use commercial building, a lift serving shared areas — lobbies, shared stairwells, communal car parks — is normally arranged and paid for through the service charge, with the freeholder or their managing agent holding the maintenance contract and therefore acting as duty-holder. This is the arrangement duty-holders should expect by default in leasehold blocks.
Who is responsible inside a tenant's unit?
Where lifting equipment sits entirely within one tenant's own demise and is operated exclusively by that tenant's staff — a warehouse's own forklift fleet, a restaurant's own dumbwaiter, a hospital department's own patient hoist — responsibility for LOLER compliance normally sits with that tenant, since they're the ones with day-to-day control over how it's used and maintained.
What should the lease specify?
Because control (not ownership) determines the duty-holder, ambiguous leases are a genuine compliance risk. A well-drafted lease or service charge agreement should explicitly state who arranges and pays for statutory examinations on any shared lifting equipment. If yours doesn't, that's worth raising with your managing agent or solicitor before it becomes a gap nobody's covering.
What if it still is not clear?
If a lift or item of lifting equipment isn't explicitly covered anywhere, the enforcing authority will look at who exercised practical control at the time — not just whose name is on the freehold or lease. In a managed office or retail building that authority is usually the local council rather than HSE. Duty-holders shouldn't assume "someone else" is arranging it; if you're not certain who's responsible for a piece of equipment your organisation uses, that's worth resolving directly rather than discovering it after an incident.
Sources & Further Reading
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