Plant hire companies carry more LOLER exposure than almost any other business type. Telehandlers, forklifts, excavator lifting attachments, MEWPs, hoists and lifting accessories, all owned by you, all examined on your watch, all working on someone else's site. When a machine goes out with an overdue examination, the prosecution risk does not stay with the customer. It comes back to the depot.
This guide covers what the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 require from hire companies, the examination intervals that catch hire desks out, and how to keep certificates moving as fast as your fleet does.
Every machine in your fleet is your LOLER responsibility until it leaves the depot. And often after.
LOLER places duties on the employer who provides lifting equipment for use at work. That makes you a duty holder in HSE's language, and it is a duty you hold alongside your customer rather than instead of them. As the owner of the fleet, you must make sure every item of lifting equipment is thoroughly examined by a competent person and that a valid report of thorough examination exists before it is hired out. Hiring a machine to a customer does not transfer that history. If the examination was missed while the machine sat in your yard, that gap is yours.
The customer picks up their own duties once the plant is in use on their site. In practice, both sides rely on the same thing: a current, accessible examination report that travels with the machine.
Thorough examination before first hire. Not after the customer calls.
Regulation 9 requires thorough examination before lifting equipment is put into service for the first time, after assembly at a new location where safety depends on installation, and at set intervals through its working life. For a hire fleet that means a machine returning from one customer must have a valid examination before it goes to the next. An expiry that falls mid-hire needs to be planned for before the machine leaves, not discovered when the customer's site manager refuses to let it work.
Telehandlers, MEWPs and accessories: the intervals that catch hire desks out.
LOLER sets three default examination intervals. Which one applies depends on what the machine is doing, not what it is.
| Equipment | Interval | Typical hire fleet examples |
|---|---|---|
| Lifting equipment (general) | 12 months | Telehandlers, forklifts, hoists, excavators used for lifting |
| Equipment used to lift people | 6 months | MEWPs, scissor lifts, telehandler with man basket, personnel hoists |
| Lifting accessories | 6 months | Chains, slings, shackles, hooks, eyebolts, lifting beams |
| Per a written scheme of examination | As set by the competent person | Overrides the defaults once a scheme exists |
That last interval is where hire fleets get caught. A telehandler on a general lifting contract sits on a 12-month cycle. The same telehandler fitted with a man basket moves to 6 months. MEWPs are always 6 months because they lift people by design. Chains, slings, shackles and hooks on the tool hire side are all accessories on a 6-month cycle. A competent person can instead set intervals through a written scheme of examination, but until one exists, the statutory intervals apply.
An excavator is not LOLER equipment while it digs. The moment it lifts a suspended load, pipes into a trench for example, it is lifting equipment for that operation and needs the appropriate examination and equipment fitted. Hire companies supplying excavators with lifting eyes or hooks should treat them as part of the LOLER fleet.
LOLER covers the lifting parts. PUWER covers the rest of the machine.
Every machine in your fleet is PUWER equipment. Only some of it is LOLER equipment. The Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998 require work equipment to be suitable for its purpose, maintained, and inspected where deterioration could create a danger. LOLER sits on top of that for anything that lifts.
On most of your fleet the two regimes land on the same machine. A forklift needs its lifting components examined under LOLER and its brakes, steering, mast wear and safety devices inspected under PUWER. The same competent person can carry out both on one visit, and CFTS accreditation exists to confirm both have been covered. They still have to be recorded separately, which is where fleets on paper systems end up with a single document that satisfies neither.
The practical point for a hire desk: a machine with a valid LOLER report is not automatically a compliant machine. Ask what the examination actually covered.
Your customer will ask for the report before the machine works. Construction sites now check.
Principal contractors increasingly verify LOLER records for hired plant at the gate, before the machine starts work. We cover this from the customer's side in our construction industry guide: hired plant arrives on site, records get checked first. For a hire company this is now a commercial issue as much as a legal one. The depot that can send a current certificate with the machine, or give the customer a link to it, wins the repeat business. The depot that faxes something over two days later does not.
Certificates that travel with the machine, on hire and off hire.
Retention is not one single rule. Reports on lifting accessories must be kept for two years from the date of the report, which matters most on the tool hire side where accessories are the bulk of the fleet. In-service reports on other lifting equipment are kept until the next report supersedes them. The report from a first examination is kept for as long as you own the machine. Inspection records under Regulation 11 are kept until the next inspection is recorded, and must be available to the people who rely on them.
For a hire fleet the practical standard is higher than the legal minimum: the current certificate for every machine should be available wherever the machine is. When your customer can pull the certificate themselves from a portal, or you can send a link in seconds, a site manager can verify compliance at the gate or mid-hire without a phone call to your office.
Markings are a LOLER duty too. And they come off in the yard.
Regulation 7 requires lifting equipment to be clearly marked with its safe working load, and lifting accessories to be marked with the information needed for safe use. On a hire fleet that is not a one-off task. Stencils fade, load plates get painted over, and sling tags disappear in a tool hire cage. A chain sling with no legible marking is an accessory you cannot hire out, whatever its examination status says.
Check markings at off-hire alongside the visual check, not at the next examination. And give every asset a unique identifier that ties the machine in the yard to the report in your records. A certificate nobody can match to a specific machine is not much use to a site manager at the gate.
On cross-hire the machine is not yours. The certificate still has to be right.
When you cross-hire a machine in to cover a shortfall and send it straight out to a customer, the examination chain picks up two extra handoffs. You are not the owner and you are not the user, but you are the business the customer contracted with, and yours is the name on the delivery note.
Treat cross-hired plant exactly like your own on the way out. Get the current report of thorough examination from the supplying company before the machine leaves their yard. Check the expiry date against your customer's hire period, not against today. Record it against the job so anyone on the desk can find it. If the examination expires mid-hire, agree in writing who arranges the re-examination before the machine moves.
CPA and HAE model conditions cover most cross-hire arrangements in the UK, but allocating cost in a contract is not the same as discharging a duty. Someone has to have done the examination, and HSE will not be interested in whose spreadsheet it sat on.
The same applies in reverse. When another company takes one of your machines out to their customer, your certificate is the one that travels.
An overdue examination is not paperwork. It is a machine you cannot hire out.
Every day a machine sits in the yard with a lapsed examination is lost hire revenue. Every machine that goes out with a lapsed examination is an HSE enforcement risk, and after an incident, a prosecution risk with unlimited fines. The fix is the same for both: due dates tracked and flagged in advance across the whole fleet, so examinations are booked before expiry and machines never come off the available list unexpectedly. Our guide to LOLER record keeping requirements covers what must be held and for how long.
There is one more reason to catch problems early. If a competent person finds a defect that poses an existing or imminent risk of serious personal injury, Regulation 10 requires them to report it to the enforcing authority as well as to you. A failed examination on a hire fleet is not a private conversation with your engineer. It can put HSE on notice about how the whole fleet is maintained, which is an argument for finding defects at off-hire inspection rather than at the statutory examination.
A hire fleet across multiple depots will outgrow a spreadsheet fast.
A few hundred assets, two examination cycles, machines moving between depots and customer sites daily, and certificates requested by every principal contractor. Spreadsheets miss renewals, hold duplicate records, and cannot hand a customer a certificate at the gate. Lolerflow was built for exactly this: an asset register across every depot, automated due date reminders, Schedule 1 reports generated on the spot, and a portal where your customers pull their own certificates. From £250 a month, unlimited users, unlimited assets.