What is PUWER?
PUWER is the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations, which require work equipment to be suitable, maintained, inspected where risk requires it, and used only by people who have been trained.
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<img src="https://facilityoptix.co.uk/glossary/puwer/diagram.svg" alt="PUWER — diagram from FacilityOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://facilityoptix.co.uk/glossary/puwer">What is PUWER?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://facilityoptix.co.uk">FacilityOptix</a>
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</figure>It is broader than LOLER and applies to essentially any equipment used at work, from a ladder to a boiler plant. Where LOLER is specific to lifting, PUWER is the general duty underneath it.
Its practical demands are suitability, maintenance, inspection and training. The one most often missed is suitability: equipment that is well maintained but wrong for the task is non-compliant however good its service record.
Inspection under PUWER is risk-based rather than on a fixed calendar, which makes it harder to administer than a dated certificate and easier to let slide.
In practice
A workshop machine inherited with a building.
It works, it is old, and the guard has been removed at some point by somebody for a reason nobody remembers.
Equipment provided for use at work has to be suitable, maintained and safe regardless of its age or where it came from, and inheriting something does not inherit an exemption.
The assessment nobody did is the one that would have found the guard.
What goes wrong in practice
- Equipment maintained but never assessed for suitability for the task it is actually used for.
- Training records held for some equipment and not others, with no view of which.
- Risk-based inspection interpreted as no inspection because no interval is prescribed.