What is a duty holder?
A duty holder is the person or organisation carrying a legal duty for a building — for asbestos, fire, water safety and the rest. The duty attaches to control of the premises, not to a contract.
It cannot be contracted away. An FM provider can carry out the work and hold the records, and the duty stays with whoever controls the premises, which is the point most often misunderstood in outsourced arrangements.
Different duties can sit with different parties in a multi-let building, and the boundaries between demised areas and common parts are where they most often fall between people.
What discharges the duty is evidence rather than arrangement. Being able to show what was assessed, what was done and when is what demonstrates it was met.
In practice
A managing agent, a landlord and a tenant in one building.
Each believes a duty under a particular regime sits with one of the others, and all three are reasonable readings of the lease.
Duties attach by operation of law to whoever has control, which does not always follow the commercial arrangement and never follows assumptions.
Writing down who holds what, and having all parties agree it, is the single highest-value hour in managing a multi-let building.
What goes wrong in practice
- Duties assumed to transfer with the FM contract.
- Multi-let buildings where nobody has established who holds what.
- A named duty holder who has left the organisation, with records still addressed to them.