Lift examinations, and the report that comes every six months

Most people who manage a building with a lift know there is a contract for it. Fewer can say, without looking, when the lift was last thoroughly examined, who examined it, and whether every defect on the last report has been closed. Those are different questions from the maintenance contract, and they are the ones the law asks.

Two visits that get treated as one

The Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 (LOLER) require lifts provided for use at work to be thoroughly examined by a competent person at regular intervals. HSE's guidance for lift owners, INDG339, is clear that this is not the same thing as maintenance.

Preventive maintenance is the engineer replacing worn parts, adjusting, lubricating and keeping the lift running. A thorough examination is a systematic and detailed look at the lift by a competent person, to find defects that are dangerous or could become dangerous. HSE describes the examination as a check that maintenance is being done properly, not a replacement for it.

That is why HSE also says it is not advisable for the person who does the routine maintenance to carry out the thorough examination. They would be assessing their own work. In practice the examination is usually done by an insurer's engineer or an independent inspection body, and it arrives as a separate report on a separate cycle.

The interval

The law sets three triggers. A lift must be thoroughly examined:

• at least every six months if it is used at any time to carry people, or every 12 months if it only carries loads
• after substantial and significant changes
• after exceptional circumstances, such as damage, failure, a long period out of use or a major change in how it is used

The six month interval can be replaced by an examination scheme drawn up by a competent person, but only on the basis of a rigorous assessment of the risks, and it has to be written down. If you cannot produce the scheme, HSE's guidance says an inspector will assume the lift is on the statutory intervals.

Where a building's lift is used mainly by residents or the public rather than at work, HSE points to the wider duties in the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974, and most managing agents and landlords follow the same six month pattern for that reason. A passenger lift in a block of flats is still a machine carrying people in a shaft.

When the report comes back with a defect

The examination produces a written, signed report. HSE's guidance is that it should normally arrive within 28 days, and much sooner if there is a serious defect. It has to contain the information set out in Schedule 1 of LOLER, including the date of the last examination, when the next one is due, any defect that is or may become a danger, and the date by which a repair has to be made. If the report does not carry all of that, the guidance says not to accept it.

What happens next depends on what the report says.

A serious and significant defect means the lift comes out of service immediately, until it is put right. Keeping it running is a breach. If the competent person finds a defect that presents an existing or imminent risk of serious personal injury, they are also legally required to send a copy of the report to the enforcing authority, which is HSE or the local authority.

A defect with a timescale is different. The lift can stay in use, but it must not be used after the date given on the report unless the repair has been done. That date is the one that tends to slip, because it sits in a PDF attached to an email to someone who may have since moved on.

The records

Reports have to be kept available for inspection for at least two years, or until the next report, whichever is longer. They can be kept electronically, provided a written copy can be produced.

The pressure on lifts in residential blocks is real. In Hackney, the council began a £24 million, three year programme in June 2026 to replace or renew 120 of the worst performing lifts in its housing blocks, after residents in one Lower Clapton block went more than seven weeks without a working lift. Most portfolios will never run a programme like that. What they can do is know, for each lift, where it stands.

In a high-rise residential building there is a further layer. Regulation 7 of the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 requires monthly checks of any evacuation lift or lift for use by firefighters, and a report to the fire and rescue authority if a fault cannot be put right within 24 hours, which we covered in an earlier article.

Keeping it in one place

SAMRISK holds the building and the land it sits on across thirty connected systems, twenty for the building and ten for the land.

Each lift sits in items against the building it serves, with its type and whether it carries people. The six monthly examination, the maintenance visits and any examination scheme go on the compliance calendar as separate dates with a name against each. Examination reports go into documents against the lift, so the two year retention looks after itself. A defect with a repair date becomes a job in maintenance carrying that date, and the engineer attending is recorded through contractors and permits. If the lift is taken out of service, or someone is trapped, the event goes into incidents against the building it happened in.

None of this is complicated. The difficulty is only ever that the maintenance visit happens every month and feels like enough.

Sources: Health and Safety Executive, Thorough examination and testing of lifts: simple guidance for lift owners, INDG339(rev1); The Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998, regulation 9 and Schedule 1; The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022; Hackney Citizen, 31 July 2026, and London Borough of Hackney, on the council's £24 million lift renewal programme.