What is statutory compliance?
Statutory compliance in facilities management is the set of inspections, tests and maintenance a building must have by law, together with the records that prove they were done.
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<a href="https://facilityoptix.co.uk/glossary/statutory-compliance">What is statutory compliance?</a> — diagram by
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</figure>It is distinguished from other maintenance by not being a commercial decision. A discretionary service can be deferred when a budget is tight; a statutory inspection cannot, and the duty sits with a named duty holder rather than with the contractor.
The duties come from separate regulations covering separate risks — electrical, gas, lifting, water, fire, asbestos — each with its own competence requirements and its own record. There is no single statutory regime, which is why a single list of them is worth maintaining.
Evidence is the deliverable. Work done without a certificate that can be produced on request has protected people without protecting the organisation, and both are part of the duty.
In practice
A tenant and a landlord each assuming the other holds an obligation.
The demise splits at the suspended ceiling. The equipment above it is the landlord's and the system it serves is the tenant's, and neither tracker lists it.
The most common statutory failure is not a missed inspection but an obligation nobody claimed, and it is structurally invisible because each party's list only contains what they think is theirs.
The fix is a single list with a holder column, agreed between both.
What goes wrong in practice
- A list of statutory duties that has never been checked against what the building actually contains.
- Certificates held by the contractor who did the work rather than by the duty holder.
- Remedial actions on a certificate never actioned, so a compliant test produces a non-compliant building.
- Duties assumed to transfer to an FM provider when they remain with the duty holder.