What Is LOLER? The Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 Explained

LOLER is the short name for the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998, the UK law that governs how lifting equipment is selected, marked, used and examined at work. If your business owns, hires or simply lets its staff use anything that lifts or lowers a load — a forklift, a stacker, a lift table, a crane, a hoist, or the slings and cages that hang off them — LOLER puts duties on you. This guide explains what LOLER means in plain English: what counts as lifting equipment, what a "thorough examination" is, how often one is due, what the report must contain, and where the regulations stop and general work-equipment law takes over.

What is LOLER?

LOLER 1998 is a set of regulations made under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. It came into force in December 1998 and applies across Great Britain to any lifting equipment used at work, whether or not the business using it owns it. It sits alongside the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998 (PUWER): in almost every case, lifting equipment is also work equipment, so both sets of regulations apply at once. PUWER covers the general duties — suitability, maintenance, inspection, training. LOLER adds the lifting-specific ones on top. If you want the two compared side by side, read our guide to LOLER vs PUWER and which applies to warehouse equipment.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) supports the regulations with an Approved Code of Practice, Safe use of lifting equipment (L113). The ACOP is not itself law, but it has special legal status: if you follow it you will normally be doing enough to comply, and if you are prosecuted for a breach and did not follow it, you will need to show you complied in some other way.

What counts as lifting equipment under LOLER?

LOLER defines lifting equipment as work equipment for lifting or lowering loads, and it includes the attachments used for anchoring, fixing or supporting that equipment. A "load" is whatever is lifted — goods, materials, or people. A "lifting operation" (regulation 8) is simply an operation concerned with lifting or lowering a load.

In a warehouse, workshop or yard the equipment that falls within LOLER typically includes:

• Forklift trucks, telehandlers and other lift trucks
• Pallet stackers — manual, semi-electric and fully powered — and high-lift pallet trucks that raise a pallet to working height rather than just clearing the floor
• Scissor lift tables and other lifters and loaders
• Cranes, gantries, hoists, chain blocks, vehicle-mounted loaders and vacuum or magnetic lifters
• Passenger and goods lifts, mobile elevating work platforms (MEWPs) and any carrier used to lift people, including forklift man cages
• Lifting accessories — slings, chains, shackles, eyebolts, lifting beams, and craning cages with lifting eyes that hang from a crane hook

Two things are worth stressing. First, LOLER does not care whether the equipment is powered. A hand-operated chain block or a manual stacker is lifting equipment just as an electric one is. Second, accessories count. A crane can be perfectly maintained and still be unsafe because a sling is damaged, which is why accessories are examined more often than the machine itself (see the intervals below).

What LOLER does not cover

HSE gives specific examples of work equipment that moves loads but is not considered lifting equipment under LOLER: escalators and moving walkways, many conveyor systems, and — the one that matters most in a warehouse — simple pallet trucks that only raise the load just clear of the ground so it can be moved. A standard hand pallet truck or a powered pallet truck with a low-lift fork therefore sits under PUWER (so it must still be suitable, maintained, inspected and used by trained people) but is not subject to LOLER's thorough examination regime. The moment the lift height goes beyond that — a high-lift or scissor pallet truck, a stacker — you are back inside LOLER. The boundary is not always obvious on the shop floor, and our LOLER vs PUWER guide works through the contested cases.

LOLER also only applies to equipment used at work. A stair lift in a private home is outside it; a platform lift in a shop used by customers is outside LOLER and PUWER in that use, though the general duties of the Health and Safety at Work Act still apply and HSE expects such equipment to be examined to the same standard. Lifting equipment on ships is generally covered by merchant shipping legislation instead.

The main LOLER requirements

The regulations run to just eleven substantive regulations plus a schedule. The duties on a user of lifting equipment are:

• Strength and stability (regulation 4): the equipment must be of adequate strength and stability for each load, and every part of the load and anything attached to it must be of adequate strength too.
• Lifting people (regulation 5): equipment used to lift people must prevent them being crushed, trapped, struck or falling from the carrier, and must have suitable devices to prevent the carrier falling if the primary mechanism fails.
• Positioning and installation (regulation 6): equipment must be positioned or installed to minimise the risk of it or its load striking a person, or of the load drifting, falling freely or being released unintentionally.
• Marking (regulation 7): machinery and accessories must be clearly marked with their safe working load (SWL). Where the SWL depends on configuration, the marking must cover every configuration. Equipment for lifting people must show the number of people it can carry; equipment that is not for lifting people but could be mistaken for it must be marked to say so. (Our guide to SWL, UDL and load ratings explains how these figures are expressed on handling equipment.)
• Organisation of lifting operations (regulation 8): every lifting operation must be properly planned by a competent person, appropriately supervised and carried out in a safe manner. The depth of the plan scales with the risk — a routine pallet lift needs trained people following a method; a tandem crane lift needs a written lift plan.
• Thorough examination and inspection (regulation 9): the requirement most people mean when they say "LOLER inspection" — covered in detail below.
• Reports and defects (regulation 10) and keeping of information (regulation 11): what must be recorded and for how long.

LOLER inspection versus thorough examination — the difference

People talk about a "LOLER inspection" or a "LOLER check", but the regulations use a more precise term: thorough examination. A thorough examination is a systematic and detailed examination of the equipment and its safety-critical parts, carried out at specified intervals by a competent person who then produces a written report. It may involve visual examination and functional checks, measurement of wear and, where the competent person judges it necessary, non-destructive testing or load testing. Most equipment does not need routine load testing at every examination; HSE notes that some overload tests can themselves damage equipment.

An inspection is something different and lighter. Inspections and pre-use checks are the day-to-day and periodic checks done by the operator or maintenance staff between thorough examinations — the daily walk-round of a forklift, the weekly look over a crane, the pre-use check of a sling. LOLER regulation 9 allows for inspections at suitable intervals between thorough examinations where the risk assessment calls for them, and PUWER requires maintenance and inspection generally. So a compliant regime has three layers: pre-use checks by the operator, periodic inspections by trained staff, and statutory thorough examinations by a competent person.

How often is a LOLER thorough examination required?

Thorough examinations are required at several points in the life of the equipment:

• Before first use — unless the equipment has a Declaration of Conformity made less than twelve months earlier and its safety does not depend on how it was installed or assembled. New lifting equipment placed on the market must carry a Declaration of Conformity, so keep it: it is the document that lets you skip the initial examination.
• After installation or assembly, and before use at each new location, where safety depends on the installation — a tower crane, a platform lift, a gantry bolted to the floor.
• Periodically while in service, where the equipment is exposed to conditions that cause deterioration liable to result in danger. That is nearly all equipment in real use.
• After exceptional circumstances — damage or failure, a long period out of use, or a major modification or repair of a critical part.

For the periodic examinations, LOLER sets default intervals unless a competent person has drawn up a written examination scheme specifying different ones:

This is the answer to the common question "is LOLER six months or twelve months?" — it depends on what is being examined. A forklift used only for goods is on a twelve-month cycle. Fit a man cage to it and lift a person, and both the truck and the cage move to six months. A chain sling is always six months. An examination scheme can lengthen or shorten these intervals, but only where a competent person has assessed the equipment and its use and documented the scheme.

Who is a competent person?

"Competent person" is not defined in the regulations, but the ACOP describes one as someone with enough practical and theoretical knowledge and experience of the lifting equipment concerned to detect defects or weaknesses and to judge how they affect the safety and continued use of the equipment. They do not have to come from an outside firm, but they must be sufficiently independent and impartial to examine without fear or favour — which is why HSE says the person who does the routine maintenance should not be the one who examines it, because they would be assessing their own work. In practice most businesses use an insurer's engineering surveyor or a specialist lifting-equipment inspection company.

The LOLER report — what a "LOLER certificate" actually is

There is no such thing as a LOLER certificate in the regulations. What the competent person must produce is a report of thorough examination, and its contents are set out in Schedule 1 of LOLER. There is no longer a prescribed form, but the report must contain all eleven items in the schedule, which include the name and address of the employer, the address of the premises, identification of the equipment, the date of the last thorough examination, the safe working load, the reason for the examination (first use, installation, periodic, exceptional circumstances), the examination date, the date the next examination is due, particulars of any defect that is or could become a danger to people and the repairs needed, and the details of the person making the report. That document is what people mean by a LOLER certificate.

Where the competent person finds a defect that is or could become a danger, they must tell you immediately, then confirm it in the written report — and they must send a copy of that report to the enforcing authority (HSE for industrial workplaces such as factories and warehouses, the local authority for most other workplaces). You must then keep the equipment out of use until the defect is put right. Where the report gives a time limit for a less urgent defect, the equipment must be repaired or withdrawn within that limit.

What records must you keep, and for how long?

Regulation 11 sets out the retention periods. Records do not have to be paper, but they must be protected from unauthorised alteration and you must be able to produce a written copy on request — for example to an inspector, or when the equipment leaves your business under hire or second-hand sale. The periods are:

• Declaration of Conformity for new equipment: keep it for as long as you operate the equipment.
• Report of the first thorough examination or an installation examination: keep until you stop using the equipment (for accessories, two years).
• Periodic thorough examination reports (the six- and twelve-month ones): keep until the next report is made, or for two years, whichever is later.
• Inspection records between examinations: keep until the next record is made.

A practical LOLER checklist for a warehouse or workshop

1. List every item that lifts or lowers a load, including accessories, and decide for each whether it is inside LOLER or PUWER-only. Low-lift pallet trucks are the usual PUWER-only case; stackers, high-lift trucks, lift tables, forklifts, cranes, hoists, slings and cages are inside LOLER.
2. Check the SWL marking on every item. If it has worn off, re-mark it. If it depends on configuration, make sure the operator can see the figure for the configuration in use.
3. File the Declaration of Conformity for anything bought new, and diarise the first thorough examination if the DoC is more than twelve months old or the equipment was assembled on site.
4. Set the examination calendar: six months for accessories and anything lifting people, twelve months for the rest, or the intervals in your written examination scheme.
5. Put pre-use checks and periodic inspections in writing, with who does them and how often, so the layer between thorough examinations is real rather than assumed.
6. Plan lifting operations in proportion to their risk, with a named competent person, and make sure nobody is lifted except in equipment designed and marked for it — our guide to forklift man cages and the UK rules on lifting people covers the most common grey area.
7. Keep the reports for the periods above and act on defects within the time the report gives.

LOLER and the equipment we supply

KC Supply sells handling and lifting equipment, not inspection services, so we cannot carry out thorough examinations or issue reports for you. What we can do is help you buy equipment whose LOLER status is clear from the outset. Across our pallet truck, stacker, scissor lift table, craning cage and forklift safety cage ranges, each listing states the rated capacity where the manufacturer publishes one, so you can match the marked SWL to the loads you handle and know which examination interval applies before the equipment arrives. Where a manufacturer does not publish a figure, the listing says so rather than guessing, and you should ask for it before you buy. For the closely related question of what is required for storage rather than lifting equipment, see our guide to racking inspection under SEMA and HSG76, and for the general duties that sit beneath LOLER, our warehouse health and safety guide.