The lift inspection you cannot skip

A lift is one of the few pieces of building plant that the law treats with specific, non-negotiable intervals. Most maintenance is governed by good practice and the manufacturer's guidance. Lifting equipment is governed by a regulation, and that regulation puts a date on the calendar whether the building manager is paying attention or not. Of all the inspections in a building's year, the lift examination is among the least forgiving to skip, because the gap shows up the moment anything goes wrong.

What LOLER actually requires

The Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998, universally shortened to LOLER, set the rhythm. Under LOLER, lifting equipment used to carry people must have a thorough examination at least every six months. Equipment used only to lift loads has a longer interval of at least twelve months, or a period set out in a written scheme of examination drawn up by a competent person.

The distinction matters in a residential or mixed-use building, because the passenger lift that residents use every day falls into the more frequent category. Six months is the floor, not the target. A competent person carrying out the thorough examination may, on the basis of the lift's condition and use, conclude that it needs examining more often, and a written scheme can formalise that.

It is worth being clear about what a thorough examination is and is not. It is a detailed inspection by a competent person, independent of routine servicing, intended to identify defects that could create a danger. It is not the same as the regular maintenance visit from the lift contractor, although the two are often confused. A building can be diligently serviced and still be in breach if the statutory examination is not carried out and recorded.

The intervals at a glance

These are the intervals set out in LOLER. They are minimums. The condition and intensity of use of a particular lift can pull the figure shorter, never longer than the regulation allows.

Servicing and examination are not the same job

One of the most common gaps we see is a building where the lift is serviced regularly and everyone assumes the obligation is met. The maintenance contract covers cleaning, adjustment and the replacement of wearing parts. The thorough examination is a separate, independent check whose whole purpose is to catch what routine servicing might miss, including problems that servicing itself might have introduced.

Keeping the two distinct in your records is part of doing this properly. A maintenance visit log is not evidence of a thorough examination, and a regulator or insurer will know the difference. The report of a thorough examination is its own document, with its own date and its own findings, and it should be filed as such.

Acting on what the examination finds

A thorough examination is only useful if its findings are acted on. Where the competent person identifies a defect that presents a danger, or could do so within a set period, that is not a note for later. It carries a duty to act, and in serious cases to take the equipment out of use until the defect is addressed. The examination is the diagnosis; the repair is the treatment, and the record has to show both.

This is where lift inspection connects to the wider maintenance discipline. The examination identifies the action, the action gets scheduled and owned, and the closure gets recorded. A finding that is logged but never closed is arguably worse than no finding at all, because it documents that you knew. We make the broader argument for keeping that loop closed in planned maintenance beats reactive every time.

Keeping the evidence in order

The practical failure with lift examinations is rarely that they are not done. It is that the evidence is scattered, so that when someone asks for proof, it takes a frantic search through emails and the contractor's portal to assemble it. The fix is unglamorous. Keep the examination reports, their dates, the next-due dates and the status of any actions in one place, attached to the building they belong to.

That way the lift carries its own provable history: when it was last examined, by whom, what was found, and whether the findings were closed. A compliance calendar that tracks the next-due date and a record that holds the reports together do most of the work, and they turn a stressful request for evidence into a short one.

The inspection you plan around, not past

There are maintenance tasks where a slipped date is a minor embarrassment. The statutory lift examination is not one of them. It carries a fixed minimum interval, a separate identity from routine servicing, a duty to act on what it finds, and a real burden of proof. Treat it as a fixed point in the building's year, schedule everything else around it, and keep the evidence where you can produce it without a search. The lift is the one piece of plant that will tell on you immediately if you do not.