The statutory inspections a facilities team actually needs to run

Ask a facilities manager to list every statutory inspection their estate is subject to and the answer usually comes out as a partial list, recalled from memory, missing at least one thing. That's not a knock on any individual manager — the obligations genuinely sit scattered across separate pieces of legislation and guidance, each with its own scope, interval and evidence expectations, and there's no single master document that lists them all in one place.

Why this is harder than it should be

Under general health and safety duty-holder obligations, an employer or person in control of premises has to keep the building safe for the people in it — but that duty doesn't come with a single checklist attached. It's expressed through a range of separate regulations, each covering a different category of risk: water systems, electrical installations, lifting equipment, pressure systems, and more, each with its own competent-person requirements and its own inspection rhythm.

The inspections most facilities teams are actually running

In practice, most facilities teams end up managing some version of the same core set: water hygiene and legionella risk assessment, periodic electrical testing, thorough examination of lifting equipment under LOLER, and written scheme examination of pressure systems under PSSR where relevant plant exists on site. Fire safety inspections and emergency lighting testing sit alongside these too, often owned by a different specialist but tracked through the same facilities function.

• –Water hygiene and legionella control — risk assessment and ongoing monitoring, not a one-off certificate
• –Fixed electrical installation testing — periodic inspection and testing on an interval set by the assessment, not a fixed universal number
• –Lifting equipment — thorough examination under LOLER, at a frequency that depends on the equipment type
• –Pressure systems — written scheme of examination under PSSR, where relevant plant is present
• –Fire safety systems, alarms and emergency lighting — routine testing on top of the wider fire risk assessment

What differs between all of these

The specifics differ enough between each of these that treating them as one generic "compliance checklist" tends to cause problems. Intervals aren't identical, competent-person requirements differ, and what counts as adequate evidence varies — a photograph and a signature is fine for some categories and genuinely insufficient for others. Lumping them together into a single generic reminder system is how gaps get missed, because the specific requirement of one category gets quietly applied to another where it doesn't actually fit.

Building an inspection calendar that reflects the actual estate

A workable approach starts with an honest inventory of what's actually on site — which buildings have water systems with the relevant risk profile, which have lifting equipment, which have pressure vessels — rather than assuming every category applies everywhere. From there, each category gets its own interval, its own competent person or contractor, and its own evidence trail, feeding into a single calendar so nothing gets missed simply because it lives in a different regulation to everything else.

What happens after an inspection matters as much as the inspection itself — a finding that isn't followed through to a closed job is really just a documented risk, not a managed one. We've written separately about what should happen once an inspection finds a defect.

Why this is genuinely hard to hold in one head

A mid-sized estate can be carrying statutory obligations under half a dozen separate regimes at once, each with its own competent person, its own interval logic, its own report format and its own idea of what closing a finding means. They were written at different times by different bodies for different hazards, and nothing in the regulatory landscape ever tidied them into a single calendar.

Which is why the failure is rarely ignorance of an obligation and much more often a gap between regimes: an item that everybody assumed sat inside somebody else's inspection. The practical defence is a single calendar covering every regime the estate is subject to, owned by one person, with the competent person named against each line — so a gap is visible as a blank rather than as an assumption.

Common mistakes

• –Holding each regime's schedule separately, so nobody can see the whole obligation
• –Assuming an item is covered by another inspection without confirming it
• –Booking the inspection but not tracking whether findings were closed
• –Losing track of which competent person is responsible for which regime
• –Treating the report arriving as the end of the obligation
• –No single owner, so coverage depends on several people each assuming the other has it

This is a directional overview, not a substitute for checking the current HSE guidance and the specific regulation for each category — inspection intervals and evidence requirements are set by that guidance and by a competent assessor's own judgement, not by this post.