LOLER, PUWER and PAT on One Equipment Register

A maintenance supervisor at a fabrication site near Coventry found out his scissor lift was six weeks overdue for its LOLER thorough examination when the hired-in examiner turned up and asked for the current certificate. The certificate was there. The next due date was in a spreadsheet that had not been opened since March.

That is not an unusual story. It is, in fact, one of the more common ways that compliance gaps get discovered on manufacturing sites: not through internal review, but when someone external arrives and starts asking questions.

Three Registers, Three Different People, Nobody Looking at All Three

LOLER, PUWER, and PAT each run on their own timetables and, on most sites, end up in three separate logs kept by three different people.

LOLER examinations on lifting equipment, typically six months for equipment used to lift people and twelve months for most other lifting gear. PUWER inspections on work equipment, intervals set by the manufacturer’s guidance and the site’s own risk assessment, which means the intervals drift unless someone is paying attention. PAT testing on portable appliances, no fixed legal interval, with most sites defaulting to annual as a practical minimum.

Each one has a different certificate format, a different competent person signing it off, and a different filing habit. The result is that the site manager checks one log, the maintenance team works from another, and the H&S coordinator has a third version on her desktop. Nobody is looking at all three together.

What the Regulations Actually Require

It is worth being clear about what each regulation actually asks for, because there is a tendency to treat all three as equally demanding, and they are not quite.

LOLER (Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998) requires thorough examination at defined intervals and a written report retained for inspection. The intervals are prescribed: six months for equipment that lifts people, twelve months for most other lifting equipment, or as specified by a written examination scheme.

PUWER (Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998) requires that work equipment is maintained in a safe state and that records are kept where appropriate. The inspection intervals are not prescribed in the same way. This is where dates tend to slip, because without a clear deadline it is easy to push inspections back.

PAT has no fixed statutory interval. The IET Code of Practice gives guidance by equipment class and working environment. The legal obligation is simply that portable appliances are maintained safely. In practice, most sites run annual testing and treat it as the default.

Three frameworks. Three different approaches to recording and scheduling. One site.

Why the Fragmentation Causes Problems

The information is usually there. The certificates exist, the dates were recorded at some point, and most sites are broadly compliant most of the time. The problem is visibility.

When inspection dates live in separate places, nothing flags the approaching deadline automatically. An overhead crane, a bench grinder, and a kettle in the welfare room can all come due in the same fortnight. Under a fragmented system, nobody sees that fortnight coming. Under a single register, it is obvious.

The other problem is audits. An inspector, whether internal or external, wants evidence that you knew what was due and acted on it. Three separate logs in three different formats, maintained by three different people, do not tell that story clearly. A single register with every asset, every date, and every status on one page does.

What to Put on a Single Equipment Register

A well-built register covers every asset subject to statutory inspection: lifting equipment under LOLER, work equipment under PUWER, portable appliances under PAT. Each item gets a category, a last inspection date, a due date, a responsible person, and a current status.

The status is the important part. Overdue is red. Due within thirty days is amber. Current is green. When you open the register on a Monday morning, you can see at a glance what needs to happen this month, what is coming up next month, and what can wait.

It also gives the maintenance team something to plan around. If three pieces of equipment are all due for examination in the same week, it is better to know that in advance than to discover it when the examiner’s diary is already full.

The Register That Does the Flagging For You

The SafetyDeskStudio Equipment Register and Maintenance Scheduler covers LOLER, PUWER, and PAT dates on one tracker, with conditional formatting that flags upcoming and overdue items automatically. Enter each asset once, assign it to the relevant regulatory category, log the last examination date, and the register does the arithmetic.

It is a spreadsheet, not a subscription. You own it outright, you can adapt it to your site, and there is no login, no onboarding, and no ongoing cost. For a site running twenty to fifty pieces of tracked equipment, that is the right level of tool for the job.

If you are working through a broader review of where time and money are disappearing on site, the loss category tool at losses.cadencestandard.com is a useful place to start putting numbers to the problem. Equipment reliability and unplanned downtime usually come out near the top of that list, which is exactly where a register like this earns its keep. You will find it alongside the rest of the ops tools at /toolkit/.