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Integrity Lift Compliance

Sector — Commercial Property

LOLER Inspections for Commercial Property

In a managed building, the duty to examine lifting equipment sits with whoever has control of it — and that is frequently disputed between freeholder, managing agent and tenant until something goes wrong. Getting the examination right is the straightforward part; getting the duty-holder position right matters just as much.

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26+ Years Hands-On Engineering Experience
Independent of Maintenance Contracts
7 Days a Week, 6am to 6pm
Same-Day Reports, With Photos

Certificate expired or lift out of compliance? You're exposed to enforcement action, and your insurance may not respond, until it's resolved. What to do.

Call Office, 07496 873972

What Makes This Sector Different

The compliance pressures specific to commercial property

Façade access is the one that gets forgotten

A building maintenance unit carries people over the edge of a building. It is on the six-month cycle, it is often out of sight on a roof, and it is regularly the first thing to lapse when a managing agent changes.

Duty-holder ambiguity is not a defence

An inspector looks at who had control of the equipment, not at what the lease says in isolation. We are direct about where the duty appears to sit and what evidence supports it.

Insurers read the report before you do

A Report of Thorough Examination is the document an insurer asks for after an incident. Written vaguely it creates an argument; written properly it closes one.

Equipment We Examine

Typical Commercial Property Plant

Also inspected for commercial property: Rope Access Equipment Inspections · Harness & Fall Arrest Inspections

Our Experience Here

Why we say this

Our commercial tower case study covers a BMU cradle recovery programme, and Mark's career includes commercial property portfolios.

Who enforces here

Usually the local authority. Office premises are council-enforced, so the officer asking about your passenger lift or BMU is typically from environmental health rather than HSE.

Commercial Property · Canary Wharf

Recovering a Lapsed Façade Access Programme on a Commercial 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.

Read the worked example

Further reading for commercial property duty-holders

LOLER Responsibility: Landlord or Tenant?
LOLER responsibility follows control of the equipment, not ownership of the building. In practice, the freeholder or managing agent is usually the duty-holder for lifts in shared areas, while a tenant can become the duty-holder for lifting equipment they operate exclusively within their own unit.
UK Lift Compliance: The Complete Legal Framework
Lift compliance in the UK isn't governed by a single regulation. Safety in use comes from LOLER 1998 and PUWER 1998, access from the Equality Act 2010, and the BS EN 81-20/81-50 standards set the design baseline new lifts are built to — four frameworks that do different jobs and are easily confused.
What Happens If LOLER Expires?
The plant is no longer legally usable, and the cost of a lapse is rarely the examination you did not book. Quarantine the equipment, arrange a thorough examination promptly, and document the steps taken — then resume once a competent person has examined the plant and signed it off.

Trusted by Critical Estates

Independent. Defensible. Genuinely Endorsed.

SAFed-aligned defect classification, and the endorsement below is a genuine NHS Trust quote — not stock marketing copy.

NHS
NHS
Critical estate passenger lift compliance experience
SK
Skanska
Construction & engineering compliance support
A·B·C
SAFed-Aligned Defect Grading
Defects graded A, B or C to the published SAFed severity scale — a grading standard we follow, not a membership we hold
DBS
Enhanced DBS
Director Mark Crowley holds an enhanced DBS check
NHS Trust Endorsement
“Exceptional response times and thorough documentation. Managing compliance across multiple critical medical estates is complex, but their team makes statutory lift auditing seamless.”
Phillip Nai
Critical Healthcare Estates Manager
Barts Health NHS Trust

Common Questions

Commercial Property — Common Questions

Do you carry out LOLER inspections for commercial property?

Yes. Our commercial tower case study covers a BMU cradle recovery programme, and Mark's career includes commercial property portfolios. We examine the classes of plant listed on this page, and every survey is scoped by an engineer with a background in that equipment.

Façade access is the one that gets forgotten — what does that mean in practice?

A building maintenance unit carries people over the edge of a building. It is on the six-month cycle, it is often out of sight on a roof, and it is regularly the first thing to lapse when a managing agent changes.

Duty-holder ambiguity is not a defence — what does that mean in practice?

An inspector looks at who had control of the equipment, not at what the lease says in isolation. We are direct about where the duty appears to sit and what evidence supports it.

Insurers read the report before you do — what does that mean in practice?

A Report of Thorough Examination is the document an insurer asks for after an incident. Written vaguely it creates an argument; written properly it closes one.

Are you independent of maintenance contractors?

Yes. We do not sell maintenance, repairs, spares or replacement plant, so a defect recorded in a Report of Thorough Examination is never a quotation in disguise. For a duty-holder presenting compliance evidence to an insurer, a client or the HSE, that separation is worth being able to state plainly.

Request a Commercial Property Compliance Survey

Tell us what you have and where. We'll reply within one business hour, and you'll deal with an engineer familiar with commercial property.

Already have an asset list or examination schedule? Email it to info@integrityliftcompliance.co.uk and we'll come back with a survey plan rather than ask you to retype it.

Survey Request Form