If you manage lifting equipment in the UK — hoists, cranes, forklift trucks, scaffolding, slings, or even a passenger lift — LOLER applies to you. The Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 isn’t optional, and the Health and Safety Executive takes non-compliance seriously. Yet many operations teams still rely on paper files, shared drives, and memory to stay on top of it.
What Does LOLER Require?
LOLER places legal duties on employers, the self-employed, and anyone who has control over lifting equipment at work. The core requirements are:
- All lifting equipment must be thoroughly examined by a competent person before first use, and at regular intervals — every 6 months for equipment used to lift people, every 12 months for other lifting equipment.
- Thorough examination reports must be kept and retained. The current report must be kept until the next examination; older reports for at least 2 years.
- Defects must be reported to the appropriate authority if the competent person believes there is an existing or imminent risk of serious personal injury.
- Lifting operations must be properly planned, supervised, and carried out safely.
What Will an HSE Inspector Actually Ask For?
When an HSE inspector visits your site, they won’t just look at the equipment — they’ll ask for the paper trail. Specifically, they’ll want to see:
- The most recent thorough examination report for each piece of lifting equipment
- Evidence that previous defects were acted upon
- A register or inventory of all lifting equipment on site
- Confirmation that examination intervals have been met
- Any written examination scheme in use
If you can’t produce these records quickly and completely, that in itself is a problem — even if the equipment is in perfect condition. The HSE can issue improvement notices, and in serious cases, prohibition notices that stop work immediately.
Where Most Teams Fall Down
The most common LOLER record-keeping failures aren’t deliberate — they’re the result of systems that weren’t designed for the task. Inspection certificates get filed in different places by different people. Equipment moves between sites and the records don’t follow it. An expiry date passes unnoticed because no one was tracking it.
Spreadsheets are the default tool for most operations teams, and they work — until they don’t. A spreadsheet doesn’t alert you when a certificate is about to expire. It doesn’t attach to a physical asset via a QR code. It doesn’t produce an HSE-ready report in one click.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
LOLER enforcement can result in:
- Improvement notices requiring corrective action within a set timeframe
- Prohibition notices stopping lifting operations entirely
- Prosecution under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, with unlimited fines and up to two years’ imprisonment for individuals in serious cases
- Civil liability if a LOLER failure contributes to an accident
Beyond the legal consequences, a work stoppage on a construction site or in a warehouse can cost far more than any compliance system.
How to Stay on Top of LOLER Without the Admin Burden
A practical LOLER compliance system needs to do four things: maintain a complete asset register, attach inspection records to individual assets, send alerts before examinations are due, and produce audit-ready documentation on demand.
Taggit is built around exactly this workflow. Each piece of lifting equipment gets a QR code or NFC tag. Scanning it on-site pulls up its full inspection history, current status, and next due date — GPS-stamped and timestamped. When an examination is approaching, the system alerts the responsible person automatically. When an inspector arrives, you generate the report in one click.
LOLER compliance doesn’t have to be a filing exercise. With the right system, it becomes part of how your team operates day-to-day — and the paperwork takes care of itself.
Want to see how Taggit handles LOLER records for your team? Start a free trial — no credit card required.