Your statutory duties do not share a map
By webmaster · · 7 min read
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Two of the duties on your estate are lifting equipment and pressure
systems. Both are Health and Safety Executive regimes. Both turn on
periodic examination by a competent person. One of them puts a number in
the regulation. The other refuses to.
That is not an oddity. It is the shape of the whole problem.
Two
regimes, two clocks, and one of the clocks is not a number
The Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998, SI
1998/2307, are specific. Regulation 9(3)(a) requires thorough
examination “in the case of lifting equipment for lifting persons or an
accessory for lifting, at least every 6 months”, and “in the case of
other lifting equipment, at least every 12 months”. Note the accessory.
An accessory for lifting sits on the six month clock alongside the
passenger lift, not on the twelve month one, and it is the limb a
register can most quietly lose. Even those intervals are a default
rather than an absolute, because the same regulation offers examination
“in accordance with an examination scheme” as an alternative.
The Pressure Systems Safety Regulations 2000, SI 2000/128, do
something different. Regulation 8 requires the user of an installed
system to have “a written scheme for the periodic examination, by a
competent person” of protective devices, pressure vessels, pipelines and
relevant pipework. The scheme must be “drawn up, or certified as being
suitable, by a competent person”, and it is the scheme, not the
regulation, that “specifies the nature and frequency of
examination”.
There is no statutory interval for pressure systems.
Any register asserting that PSSR means 12 months, or 14, or 26, is wrong
as a matter of law. The correct entry in your frequency column is a
pointer to a document drawn up by somebody who does not work for
you.
Same regulator, same idea of a competent person, and the obligation
lands in two different places: one in the statute book, one in a third
party’s file.
A
hospital is a higher-risk building for one purpose and not for the
other
Here the fragmentation stops being administrative and starts being
legal.
Section 65(1) of the Building Safety Act 2022 defines the term for
the occupation regime in Part 4: “higher-risk building” means a building
in England that “(a) is at least 18 metres in height or has at least 7
storeys, and (b) contains at least 2 residential units”. Both limbs.
Height or storeys, and two residential units.
Section 120D(2) of the Building Act 1984 defines it for design and
construction. The height limb is identical. The second limb is
different: the building must be “of a description specified in
regulations made by the Secretary of State”. Regulation 2 of the
Higher-Risk Buildings (Descriptions and Supplementary Provisions)
Regulations 2023, SI 2023/275, specifies those descriptions as “(a) a
building which contains at least two residential units; (b) a care home;
(c) a hospital”.
So a 20 storey acute hospital with no residential units in it is a
higher-risk building when you are building or refurbishing it, and is
not one when you are running it. The refurbishment limb is worth pinning
down, because it is the one that catches estates teams: section 120D(7)
sends you to section 91ZA, and 91ZA(1) makes the regulator the building
control authority for “any higher-risk building in England or any
proposed such building”. Not only a proposed one. Work to the hospital
you already have is higher-risk building work. The design and
construction regime applies to the project. The Part 4 occupation
duties, the accountable person, the safety case, do not arise.
The opposite belief is easy to acquire, and from a credible source.
The GOV.UK golden thread guidance states the threshold in one sentence:
“A higher-risk building is a building that has at least: 7 storeys or is
at least 18 metres high; 2 residential units or is a hospital or a care
home.” That sentence merges both regimes without naming the phase that
separates them. Read it as an operational duty and you will conclude
your hospital needs a safety case, and you will be resourcing something
the statute does not ask of you.
The
duties that look like maintenance are information duties
Regulation 4 of the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012, SI
2012/632, does not ask for a survey on a shelf. Its dutyholder is
whoever has a contractual or tenancy obligation “in relation to the
maintenance or repair of non-domestic premises”, or, failing that,
whoever has control of them. The written plan has to be reviewed, and
the information about location and condition has to reach “every person
liable to disturb it” and be “made available to the emergency
services”.
Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 works the same way, and
since 1 October 2023 it has applied to all non-domestic premises in
England and Wales, because it amends the Order that stops at that
border. Responsible Persons must record the fire risk assessment in full
rather than only its significant findings, record the name of whoever
carried it out, record the fire safety arrangements, keep contact
information including a UK-based address current, and hand “any relevant
fire safety information” to the incoming Responsible Person.
Both duties turn on information arriving somewhere else, held by
someone else, at a moment you do not choose. A spreadsheet can record
that the survey happened. It cannot evidence that the contractor
drilling the riser was told.
Even the fire duties
do not share a border
The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, SI 2005/1541, settles
the question in its first article. Article 1(4): “This Order extends to
England and Wales only.” Scotland has its own Act, and section 54, in
Part 3 of the Fire (Scotland) Act 2005, imposes a parallel but separate
duty to assess the premises for risks to relevant persons from fire and
to take reasonable fire safety measures. The Fire Safety Act 2021
settles its own position at section 4: “This Act extends to England and
Wales only.” And section 65 of the Building Safety Act 2022 says “a
building in England”.
An estate with sites in England and Scotland does not have one fire
policy with local variations. It has two regimes that happen to
rhyme.
The
water duties are not in a statutory instrument at all
They fragment along a different axis again. The Approved Code of
Practice on legionella is L8, fourth edition, 2013, and at that edition
the technical detail was taken out of L8 and published separately as
HSG274. The code and the technical guidance are two documents, and the
code is not a statutory instrument at all.
No
system fixes this, and the dashboard will still look green
None of this is fixable by buying a system. The obligations differ in
kind, not just in format: one is an interval, one is a third party’s
scheme, one is a disclosure to the fire service, one is a handover. A
database that flattens them into rows with a next-due date will produce
a green dashboard over exactly the failures that matter.
What is worth borrowing is the golden thread’s specification rather
than its jurisdiction. For most operational estates it is not a duty,
and pretending otherwise is the same error in the other direction. But
its test is a good one: information kept digitally, secure, available
when someone needs it, and “in a simple format that is easy to
understand and written in plain English”.
Which gives you the question to take into your next audit. If
you cannot produce the evidence within an hour of being asked, you do
not have it, whatever the spreadsheet says. The obligation was
never to hold the record. It was to be able to hand it over.
