LOLER, PAT, OSHA, Test & Tag: Inspection Regimes Explained for Hire Businesses

Wherever you hire equipment, some authority expects it tested — the acronyms just change at the border. The UK examines lifting gear under LOLER and portable electricals by PAT convention. The US works to OSHA requirements. Australia and New Zealand test and tag.

Underneath, the idea is constant: certain equipment must be examined at defined intervals by competent people, and you must be able to prove it happened.

LOLER requires thorough examination of lifting equipment — typically six-monthly for lifting accessories and equipment that lifts people, twelve-monthly for much of the rest. PAT expectations scale with how hard the equipment's life is, and hire equipment lives hard.

OSHA ties inspection to use and manufacturer guidance. Test & Tag runs on interval-based tagging with the interval set by environment. The details differ; the deadline discipline does not.

For a hire business, the inspection is only half the job — the certificate is what your customer's safety officer actually asks for, often at the gate, often with the job waiting.

Certificates belong against the asset, retrievable in seconds, with the full history behind them: what was tested, when, by whom, and what the result was. If producing a certificate involves a filing cabinet, the equipment is effectively non-compliant at the moment of the question.

Compliance fails quietly — nothing announces a lapsed certificate until the question arrives with consequences. The fix is a live due list: every asset approaching or past its inspection date, visible without anyone remembering to check.

With a due list, testing becomes planned work batched sensibly by depot or engineer visit, instead of a monthly panic conducted by spreadsheet.

The strongest compliance control in a hire business is at booking: equipment with lapsed requirements should warn — or refuse — when someone tries to book it out.

Strictness deserves configuration per regime. A lapsed sticker on a drill and a lapsed thorough examination on a crane are different conversations, and your system should reflect that judgement rather than flattening it.

Start from presets that encode the regimes for your market, rather than building intervals from scratch. Import the inspection history you already have, so day one includes your past rather than deleting it.

Then let the due list drive the routine. Most hire businesses discover compliance was never a resourcing problem — it was a visibility problem wearing a resourcing costume.