Is duty-holder a legal term?
Not in LOLER. It is industry shorthand, and a useful one, but it implies a single named person where the regulations describe a situation. Regulation 3 applies the duties to employers in respect of lifting equipment provided for use at work, to the self-employed, and to any person who has control of lifting equipment, of a person at work who uses it, or of the way it is used.
What does "to the extent of their control" mean?
It means duties follow control rather than ownership, and they divide where control divides. A freeholder who owns a lift, a managing agent who arranges its maintenance and an employer whose staff use it can each hold duties over different aspects at the same time. Nobody has to be the sole duty-holder for the duties to be real.
Can more than one party hold the duty at once?
Yes, and this is the part that causes trouble. Two organisations each assuming the other is responsible is how lifts go years without examination. The regulations do not require you to work out who is more responsible; they require the examination to happen. If you have any control over the equipment, the safest assumption is that some of the duty is yours.
Does the lease decide it?
A lease or contract can allocate who pays and who arranges, and that is worth having in writing. What it cannot do is remove a duty the regulations place on you. If you retain control in practice, you retain duties in law, whatever the lease says. The lease determines the commercial position; LOLER determines the legal one, and they do not always match.
Who is it in a typical commercial building?
Usually the freeholder or their managing agent for the lifts in common parts, and the individual tenant employer for lifting equipment inside their own demise — a goods lift in a leased unit, a forklift they operate. The split follows control. Where the building is multi-let and the agent arranges everything, the agent is normally the one holding the examination programme.
What should I do if I am not sure?
Write down who controls the equipment, who maintains it, who uses it and who arranges its examination. If any of those is you and no examination programme exists, act rather than wait for the question to be settled. An inspector asking why a lift has no current report will not be satisfied by an unresolved argument about whose job it was.
Sources & Further Reading
Independent inspection, same-day report with photos
We reply within one business hour, and the inspection is carried out by an engineer with hands-on experience of that kind of plant.