LEIA have issued the below update to their regulations, which has been shared with us via email.
Please see the information they shared below!
We covered the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 in our Technical Seminar last month and previewed some guidance we were working on. The regulations come into force on 23 January 2023.
If you are involved in any way with the management, maintenance, inspection, thorough examination or supplementary testing of lifts for use by firefighters or of evacuation lifts in high-rise residential buildings (multi-occupied residential building at least 18 metres in height or 7 or more storeys) in England, then these Regulations and our guidance is relevant. In particular, Regulation 7 requires the responsible person to carry out monthly routine checks of lifts for use by firefighters and also evacuation lifts, and for the responsible person to report faults to the fire and rescue service within 24 hours.
The link to the GOV.UK website for the Regulations is: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fire-safety-england-regulations-2022
The GOV.UK page has further links including to the following guidance to the regulations:
- Check your fire safety responsibilities under the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 which has general guidance on the routine monthly checks called for in Regulation 7.
- Fact sheet: Lifts and essential fire-fighting equipment (regulation 7) which makes clear that it is “not the intention of these regulations to require responsible persons to engage specialists to undertake these checks”. The fact sheet has links to documents on the LEIA website for the identification of different types of lifts and in footnote 2 to the following guidance on monthly routine checks: “Checks should follow BS 8899 (once revised) but in the meantime advice on checks can be found on the Lift and Escalator Industry Association (LEIA) website”
LEIA guidance
The link in footnote 2 of the GOV.UK guidance to Regulation 7 lands on our Lift & Escalator Owner News – Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 which is identical to the article we published originally in July 2022 except the link at the end of the 5th paragraph is now to our recently published more detailed guidance (see link below).
The newly published guidance is at LEIA Guidance Note: Checks and inspections of lifts for use by firefighters, evacuation lifts, and lifts with recall We previewed this at our Technical Seminar last month. The guidance provides a more complete overview of checks and inspections; not only the monthly routine checks under the new Fire Safety (England) Regulations but also on maintenance and thorough examination under the long-standing Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order.
Next steps
Owing to the short time between publication of the regulations and supporting guidance and their coming into force on 23 January 2023, we suspect that there will be a significant number of responsible persons who might not be fully aware of their new obligations, perhaps not aware of their existing obligations. Some responsible persons, despite the monthly routine checks being relatively straightforward to carry out, might be unwilling to carry out the monthly routine checks themselves and might turn to their lift maintenance companies for assistance.
Lift maintenance companies will need to ensure that they are aware of these regulations, inform a responsible person when a lift for use by firefighters or an evacuation lift has a fault so that the responsible person can meet their requirement to report the fault to the fire and rescue service within 24 hours.
We anticipate that there will be queries and comments on this as we go into the new year and implementation of the new regulations and that we would need to hold sessions, possibly virtually, to address members’ queries.
For further updates from LEIA, please follow Sheridan Lifts on social media.
For further reading, see the attached letter from LEIA here.