What Happens After a Failed LOLER Examination

The first hour: what stops, who is told, and what you write down

When the defect is existing or imminent danger, the sequence in the first hour decides whether you have a compliance event or an enforcement problem. The examiner will tell you verbally straight away; LOLER requires them to notify you forthwith, ahead of the written report. From that moment you know, and an inspector will later treat that conversation as the start of your duty, not the arrival of the paperwork.

Repair, re examination and the road back to service

A failed item does not return to service when it is fixed. It returns when a competent person has confirmed the fix, and the difference between those two moments is where duty holders most often go wrong. The defect was identified by a statutory examination; its closure has to stand on the same footing.

For an existing or imminent danger defect, treat re examination as mandatory before use. The examiner who grounded the equipment will usually say exactly that on the report, and using the equipment on the strength of a repair invoice alone means operating against the last statutory opinion on record, which still says do not use. For dated defects, complete the work inside the window and keep the evidence: the invoice, the parts, the fitter's sheet, and where the report asks for it, a re examination of the affected part.

Match the fix to the finding. A cracked hook is replaced, not welded, unless the manufacturer supports weld repair on that component, and a competent person will reject a repair that changes the equipment from its examined configuration. If the repair amounts to a modification, say a different hoist fitted to the same runway, you have not repaired the old equipment, you have created an installation that needs thorough examination after installation and before first use.

Keep the failed report. It is not embarrassing paperwork to be replaced by the clean one; it is part of the equipment's statutory history, it evidences that your system found and fixed a danger, and its absence from the file is far harder to explain than its presence. Retention rules do not pause because the news was bad.

Hired plant, borrowed kit and whose failure it is

Failure on hired equipment produces the most confusion, because two organisations each assume the other is acting. The legal position is less forgiving than the assumption: LOLER duties attach to the employer whose undertaking uses the equipment, so a failed report on a hired telehandler stops it on your site exactly as it would stop your own machine, whoever owns the asset or arranged the examination.

Tell the hire company the same day, in writing, and be precise: the defect entry, the category, and whether the examiner has grounded the machine. A good hire desk will swap the unit or arrange the repair and re examination; a poor one will tell you the machine was fine when it left the depot, which may be true and changes nothing about today. Do not return a grounded machine into the hire pool silently, because the next user inherits a danger you knew about, and the paper trail shows the knowledge stopped with you.

Check what the hire contract actually says about thorough examination. Most place the periodic examination on the owner and the pre use checks on you, but the contract cannot move the duty not to use defective equipment, which sits with the user in all cases. If the hire company supplies a replacement, ask for its current report before it lifts, not after: on hire fleets, the report should travel with the machine as routinely as the key.

For equipment borrowed between group companies or shared across a site, agree in writing which entity holds the examination duty, because informal sharing is how items fall off every schedule at once. The examiner can only examine what someone owns on paper.

What failure does to your intervals, your scheme and your next twelve months

A failed examination is information, and a duty holder who files it without adjusting anything has paid for the information and declined to use it. The finding should feed three decisions: the interval, the maintenance regime, and what your own checks look for.

If the equipment runs under an examination scheme, the competent person should review whether the scheme's intervals and scope still fit what the failure revealed. A hoist that cracked a hook in a clean workshop is one data point; the same crack on a hoist in a galvanising shop suggests the environment is consuming the margin the scheme assumed, and the scheme should tighten. Schemes are living documents, and the review after a failure is exactly the mechanism LOLER provides for learning.

On the default statutory intervals, you cannot lawfully extend, but the failure should still change behaviour between examinations: the pre use check gains a line for the component that failed, the maintenance schedule brings the relevant strip forward, and the storeroom holds the part that took a week to source. If the same defect appears on the sibling units, examine them without waiting for their dates, because exceptional circumstances include events that cast doubt on safety, and a fleet wide defect on unit one is precisely such an event for units two to six.

Finally, read failures across the estate rather than one at a time. Three unrelated failures in a year from one supplier of slings, or on one duty, or in one building, are a pattern wearing the costume of coincidence, and patterns are what your defect categories guide and examination records exist to expose.

Insurers, records and the questions that arrive after a failure

A failed examination usually has an audience beyond the workshop. Where the examination is delivered through your engineering insurer, the insurer sees the report as a matter of course, and a defect involving danger will be visible to the people who price your risk. That is not a reason to route examinations away from scrutiny; it is a reason to make the closure visible too, because insurers respond to how failures are handled far more than to the fact of them.

Keep the failure file complete and in one place: the report, your isolation note, the repair evidence, the re examination report, and any correspondence with the hire company or the enforcing authority. If an inspector or an insurer surveyor visits six months later, that file answers every question in the order they will ask it: when did you know, what did you do, when did it lift again, and on whose opinion.

Expect the enforcing authority to do nothing in most cases. The examiner's statutory copy is intelligence, not an automatic visit, and a well handled failure generally ends there. Where a visit does follow, it is usually because the failure is part of a pattern, the equipment kept working, or an incident brought the file forward. All three are within your control before the examiner ever arrives.

The reports themselves stay on the retention clock: the current report and its predecessors kept per the retention rules, accessory reports for two years, and the failed report kept alongside the fresh one it led to. A file with a hole where the bad news should be reads worse than the bad news ever did.

Preventing the next one: what failures say about the gap between examinations

Most failed examinations were visible before the examiner arrived. The crack had been propagating for months, the chain had been stretching all year, the limit switch had been overridden since spring. The thorough examination caught it because that is the examination's job, but the six or twelve month interval is not designed to be the only pair of eyes, and a duty holder who treats it that way will keep failing examinations at intervals.

The pre use check is the front line. It takes minutes, it is done by the person with the most to lose, and it catches the obvious deterioration that otherwise waits months for the examiner: hook safety catches, visible chain damage, hydraulic weeps, tyres, decals gone from load charts. Make it specific to the equipment rather than generic, make the reporting route shorter than the shift, and act on what comes back, because a check that reports into silence stops being done within a month.

Between the daily check and the statutory examination sits maintenance, and the relationship matters: maintenance keeps the equipment serviceable, examination judges whether it is safe, and neither substitutes for the other. Equipment can be beautifully maintained and still fail on a latent defect, but equipment that is poorly maintained will fail predictably, on wear items, in ways the maintenance schedule existed to prevent. If your failures are wear, the gap is maintenance; if your failures are latent, the interval and scheme deserve the look.

Close the loop by telling the examiner what the equipment has done since they last saw it: hours, incidents, modifications, environment changes. The examination is only as sharp as the history it is given.