What Happens If LOLER Expires?

What happens the day the report expires?

As soon as the Thorough Examination interval is exceeded, the equipment is no longer being examined as LOLER 1998 Regulation 9(3) requires. It should be removed from service and clearly tagged. Nothing changes about the machine overnight — what changes is that the examination the law requires has not happened, and you can no longer show that a competent person has found it safe.

What is the enforcement risk?

Operating lifting plant with a lapsed certificate is an enforcement trigger. An inspector finding an out-of-date Thorough Examination — from HSE or your local authority, depending on the premises — can issue an Improvement Notice or, where there is a risk of serious personal injury, a Prohibition Notice. A Prohibition Notice can stop the equipment being used with immediate effect, which on a building's only passenger lift is a far bigger operational problem than the examination would have been.

How does it affect insurance?

Plant and liability policies commonly make compliance with statutory duties a condition of cover, so an incident involving lapsed plant can put cover in doubt and shift the loss towards the duty-holder. How far that goes depends on the policy wording and the circumstances rather than on any general rule — anyone telling you flatly that insurers never pay out on uncertified equipment is overstating it. Read your own policy conditions, and if you are unsure, ask your broker before you need the answer.

What does a lapse actually cost?

Rarely the price of the examination. The costs that hurt are the ones that arrive afterwards, and they are operational rather than regulatory:

1. Emergency attendance and remedial work at short notice, which prices differently from planned work because it displaces something else.
2. Hired-in replacement plant to keep operating while equipment sits quarantined — and on a passenger lift in an occupied building, there is no replacement to hire.
3. Access and accessibility problems the moment a lift is out of use, which in residential and healthcare premises can escalate quickly beyond a maintenance issue.
4. Delayed handovers and contractual exposure where a client, funder or principal contractor asks for current certification and you cannot produce it.
5. A record of lapsed statutory examination that follows you into the next insurance renewal and the next tender's prequalification questionnaire.

What should you do if the date has already passed?

Act the same day, and write down what you did. A documented, prompt response is treated very differently from a lapse nobody noticed:

1. Take the equipment out of service and tag it so nobody uses it in the meantime. Isolate it where that is practical.
2. Tell whoever holds the duty — the duty-holder, not just the maintenance contractor — so the decision is recorded at the right level.
3. Arrange a priority Thorough Examination by a competent person who is independent of whoever maintains the plant.
4. Record the lapse: the date the examination was due, the date you discovered it, and what you did about it. This is the document that shows the duty was taken seriously.
5. Action any defects found, then return the plant to service on the strength of the new Report of Thorough Examination — not before.

How do you stop it happening again?

Almost every lapse is an administrative failure rather than a safety one — a six-month interval on a lift nobody owns on paper, or an asset bought between renewals that never reached the schedule. Three things fix it:

1. Keep one register of every item of lifting equipment with its interval and next-due date, including accessories and anything hired in or inherited with a building.
2. Name one person accountable for it. Where nobody is named, the interval is nobody's job.
3. Use a provider who tracks the dates for you. We keep each client's equipment register and next-due dates, and we contact you before the examination falls due rather than after — so the interval is monitored by the people whose job it is, not remembered by somebody with another job to do.