LOLER 1998 in plain English: what duty-holders actually have to do

Smaller operators tend to talk about LOLER with confidence. They have the certificates. They know the engineer who turns up every year. Then an HSE inspector or an insurer asks the awkward question and the same gaps appear: a six-monthly accessory signed off twelve-monthly. A hoist whose competent person is the same engineer who maintains it. An MEWP whose written scheme of examination nobody can find.

The regulations are 28 years old. The gaps aren't going anywhere.

What follows is a working summary of what the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 (SI 1998 No. 2307) ask of a UK duty-holder in 2026. What counts as lifting equipment, how often it has to be thoroughly examined, who's allowed to do it, and what happens when the examiner finds something serious.

The scope is wider than most people assume

LOLER applies to any work equipment used at work for lifting or lowering loads, and to the equipment's accessories. That's broad on purpose. The list catches a lot more than the obvious cranes and forklifts:

• Patient hoists in care homes and hospitals
• Goods lifts and dumb waiters
• Building maintenance units (BMUs) and access cradles
• Mobile elevating work platforms: scissor lifts, cherry pickers, boom lifts
• Vehicle tail lifts
• Theatre and event rigging
• Excavators when used for lifting (not when digging)
• Lifting accessories: chains, slings, shackles, eyebolts, lifting beams, clamps, magnets, vacuum lifters

If you supervise a workplace that uses any of those, you're a LOLER duty-holder. The regulations don't care whether you own the kit, hire it, or borrowed it from the contractor next door. Control over its use is the test.

LOLER sits alongside PUWER 1998 (Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations). PUWER applies to all work equipment. LOLER adds extra duties for the lifting subset. When a piece of kit lifts loads, both apply at the same time.

The duties that matter

LOLER has eleven main regulations. Five of them carry most of the compliance weight.

Reg 4 is the engineering basis. The equipment, and any load attached to it, must be strong and stable enough for the intended lift. This bites at procurement. It bites again when a duty-holder quietly repurposes kit for a heavier load than it was originally rated for.

Reg 5 raises the bar for anything that can lift people. The equipment must prevent the person being crushed, trapped or struck, prevent unintended fall, and provide a way to release them safely if the equipment fails mid-lift. That is why patient hoists, MEWPs and BMUs face stricter examination intervals than a goods lift.

Reg 7 is about marking. Every piece of lifting equipment must clearly show its safe working load. Accessories must show theirs too, including any configuration-dependent variation. A chain sling rated 2 t straight can drop to 1 t at 45°. Both ratings have to be marked or referenced in a scheme.

Reg 8 is planning. Every lifting operation must be properly planned by a competent person, appropriately supervised, and carried out safely. Routine lifts can sit under a generic written method statement. One-off complex lifts (heavy, tandem, blind, over the public) need a lift plan specific to the operation. "Plan" agreed in a WhatsApp thread is not a Reg 8 plan.

Regs 9, 10 and 11 are the back-office trio: thorough examination, written reports, and records. That's where most LOLER time gets spent, and where most audits land.

Thorough examination: what "every 6 months" actually means

A thorough examination is a systematic and detailed examination of the equipment by a competent person, intended to detect defects and assess their importance. It is not a visual check. It is not the same thing as routine maintenance. It is not optional.

The default statutory intervals:

• Every 6 months for lifting equipment used to lift people, and for all lifting accessories.
• Every 12 months for everything else.

You can depart from those defaults, but only with a written examination scheme drawn up by a competent person, specifying the alternative interval and the reasoning. Without that scheme, the default applies. We still see operators running twelve-monthly intervals for chains and slings because "we've always done it that way." That was a six-monthly obligation in 1998. It's still a six-monthly obligation today.

A thorough examination is also required before the equipment is first used (unless it's new with an EU declaration of conformity less than 12 months old), after installation or assembly at a new location, and after any exceptional circumstance that could affect safety. Exceptional circumstances means a heavy overload, a collision, a long period out of service, or severe weather damage.

The competent person question

LOLER does not define "competent person" in statute. What it requires is appropriate practical and theoretical knowledge and experience to detect defects and assess their importance.

Three tests in real life:

1. Qualification. A recognised scheme. LEEA, CPCS, or an equivalent industry certification.
2. Currency. Knowledge from ten years ago isn't enough if the standard has moved.
3. Independence. The competent person must be sufficiently independent of the person responsible for routine maintenance.

That third test is the one that catches people. In a smaller organisation the same engineer who services the hoist often signs off the thorough examination. HSE guidance is explicit: the maintainer and the examiner should not normally be the same individual. An in-house competent person is fine if all three tests are met. An external one (usually via an engineering insurer) is the most common route. What you cannot do is have your maintainer sign their own thorough examination, however senior they are.

Reports, and what has to happen when they're bad

The competent person produces a written report. Schedule 1 of the regulations sets out what has to be in it: equipment identification, safe working load, date of the examination, date the next one is due, particulars of any defects, the examiner's identification. The report goes to the duty-holder as soon as is practicable.

If a defect is or could become a danger to people, two things happen. The examiner notifies the relevant enforcing authority (HSE in most workplaces, the local authority for some retail and office contexts). And the duty-holder prevents further use of the equipment until the defect is rectified.

Most examiners also use a three-tier defect shorthand: Category A (existing or imminent danger, equipment out of service immediately), B (defect to be rectified within a defined window, usually 14 to 28 days), C (recommendation or observation). That classification is convention, not statute. LOLER itself only talks about "a danger to people." But it maps cleanly onto a corrective-action workflow and is what most insurers will recognise.

Where teams trip up

After a few years building inspection workflows for lifting examiners and duty-holders, the same six issues account for most of the gaps:

1. Six-monthly accessories signed off twelve-monthly. Chains, slings, shackles, eyebolts. Most common in plant hire and small-fleet contractors.
2. No written scheme of examination. Departing from the default needs one. Most operators who think they have a scheme don't.
3. Maintainer-examiner conflict. The on-site engineer doing thorough examination on equipment they also maintain. Reports look clean. The independence test fails the first time anyone asks.
4. Missing equipment history. A thorough examination references prior exam history. Without that file, the examiner can't honestly track wear. Six years of perfect reports with no history behind them is more common than it should be.
5. Cradles and tail-lifts. Routinely forgotten. Both are lifting equipment under LOLER and need the same treatment as a forklift.
6. Plan-by-chat. A complex lift "planned" in a messaging thread is not a Reg 8 lift plan. When an incident happens, the audit trail isn't there.

None of these is exotic. All of them keep showing up.

What good looks like

A duty-holder with a clean LOLER posture can answer six questions, fast, about every asset in scope.

What is it, where is it, and what's its current safe working load? When was its last thorough examination, and when's the next one due? Who did the examination, what scheme are they on, and what was the report reference? Are there any open defects, and if so what category were they and what was the corrective action? If the interval departs from the LOLER default, where's the written scheme? If it can lift people, where's the rescue plan?

The platform we build at Hovermarks is shaped around those six questions. But you don't need a platform to answer them. You need a record system that an examiner, an insurer, or an HSE inspector can walk through without your help. If yours can't, that's where to start.