If you are a duty-holder who operates Passenger/Goods Lifts, you will undoubtedly be aware of the Safety Risks they pose. However, the good news is that if they are built/installed correctly and have a meaningful program of maintenance, keeping them operating safely is relatively straight forward.
Implementation of 6-monthly thorough examinations by a completely impartial, independent competent person – is all that is needed.
Regardless of wether you are operating 49 landing high speed lifts at Canary Wharf, or the 2 landing platform lifts at your local council offices, the HSE have published a guide to inform duty-holders/lift operators in the UK everything they need to know. Click on the document below to have a look:
Having implemented a program of thorough examinations for the Passenger/Goods lifts, all that remains for the duty-holder to do, is act on the thorough examination report findings. Most of this will be simple instructions to the lift maintainers to action defects highlighted in the reports.
However, if you spent a little time looking at the information in the HSE prosecution databases linked on our home-page, you may have noted that this part of the lift management process is where things can go awry.
The Safed LG1 document below is provided to help duty-holders understand the outputs of thorough examination reports and underline who is responsible for what. The document is intended to provide guidance to the competent person, so familiarisation with this should provide meaningful insight.
As the above document is designed to speak the language of the competent person the requirement for Supplementary testing may seem complex.
A key output of this document for a duty-holder, is the very clear understanding of who is responsible for undertaking the supplementary tests and how/why they are called for by the competent person.
The other key output is the competent person looking for evidence of some of the supplementary tests being undertaken within the previous 5 or 10 year period. So despite being an extension of the thorough examination and called by the competent person as needed, the duty-holder has a responsibility to ensure supplementary tests are completed within the 5 or 10 year period.