What is a compliance certificate?
A compliance certificate is the document evidencing that a statutory inspection or test was carried out, by whom, on what date, with what result and what remedial work is required.
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<a href="https://facilityoptix.co.uk/glossary/compliance-certificate">What is a compliance certificate?</a> — diagram by
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</figure>The certificate is the deliverable rather than the visit. Work done without a certificate that can be produced on request has protected people without protecting the organisation, and both matter.
A satisfactory certificate and a compliant building are different things when the certificate carries remedial actions. Those actions are the part that gets missed.
Certificates have expiry dates that vary by discipline, and tracking them centrally is the difference between a compliance position that is known and one that is assumed.
In practice
A folder of certificates produced for an audit.
Every certificate is present and in date. The auditor asks which assets each one covers, and the answer is not on them.
A certificate evidences that work was done on something, and the link between the certificate and the asset register is what makes it evidence of coverage.
An estate can hold a complete set of certificates and still have plant nobody has serviced.
What goes wrong in practice
- Certificates held by the contractor who issued them rather than by the duty holder.
- Remedial actions on a certificate never extracted or tracked.
- Expiry dates held in the documents rather than in a system that raises them.