In Great Britain, the statutory compliance requirements for facilities management (FM) come from the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the regulations beneath it. Northern Ireland has its own equivalent law. In practice, you must assess risk and keep gas, electrical, fire, water, lifting, pressure, refrigerant, and asbestos systems in a safe condition. You also need records that prove each check took place. Among the areas covered here, three duties have intervals set in law. They are thorough examinations of lifting equipment, F-gas leak checks, and the landlord annual gas safety check for residential accommodation. Most other intervals come from Approved Codes of Practice (ACOPs), guidance, or standards. Two newer laws apply to specific buildings. The Building Safety Act 2022 covers higher-risk residential buildings in England. Martyn's Law will add terrorism preparedness duties for larger venues across the UK.

Who is legally responsible for statutory compliance in FM?

Each statutory duty sits with a named duty holder, and one building can have several. Different laws give the role different names, so identify each of these at every site:

• Duty holder: the general term for anyone with a legal health and safety duty, starting with the employer
• Responsible Person: holds fire safety duties under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 in England and Wales, including reviewing the fire risk assessment. In Scotland the duty holder carries the fire safety duties, and in Northern Ireland the appropriate person
• Accountable Person: under the Building Safety Act 2022, whoever holds the common parts or a repairing obligation for them in a higher-risk building in England
• Asbestos dutyholder: under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012, whoever must assess and manage asbestos in non-domestic premises
• Legionella responsible person: under L8, the competent person the dutyholder appoints to take day-to-day control of Legionella risk. This is a different role from the fire Responsible Person

If you outsource maintenance, write each duty holder's name into the contract. State which party books, carries out, and records each inspection, because overdue tasks hide in the gap between client and contractor.

Which laws form the core of FM compliance?

Two pieces of law sit beneath every other requirement in this guide. The first is section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 (HSWA). It requires every employer to protect employees' health, safety, and welfare, so far as is reasonably practicable. The second is regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, which requires a suitable and sufficient risk assessment. It must cover your employees and anyone else your work affects. You review it when you suspect it's no longer valid or after a significant change. Your risk assessments then set many of the inspection frequencies that the specific regulations leave open.

What is the difference between statutory requirements and guidance?

A statutory requirement is a duty written into an Act or regulation, and a breach can lead to enforcement or prosecution. Guidance explains how to meet that duty, and many familiar inspection intervals come from guidance. FM schedules draw on four types of source:

• Law: Acts and regulations, such as the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 (LOLER), which set the duty and sometimes a fixed interval
• Approved Codes of Practice: Health and Safety Executive (HSE) documents, such as L8 for Legionella, with practical advice on complying with the law
• HSE guidance: documents such as HSG274, which states that following it is not compulsory unless specifically stated
• Industry standards: BS 7671, BS 5839-1, and SFG20, which describes itself as the industry standard for building maintenance specification

SFG20 schedules flag task criticality by colour, with red marking statutory or legal tasks and pink marking business-critical ones. Tag your own schedule the same way, so an auditor can see which visits the law demands.

What happens if you miss a statutory inspection?

A missed statutory inspection exposes you to enforcement. Under the HSE enforcement policy, inspectors can serve an improvement notice when a breach needs fixing within a set period. They can serve a prohibition notice when there's a risk of serious personal injury. Failing to comply with either notice is a criminal offence, and serious breaches can end in prosecution. For a breach of the main HSWA duties, the higher courts can impose an unlimited fine, up to two years' imprisonment, or both. Prosecution can reach both the organisation and, in some cases, individual managers.

Many FM contracts also tie compliance to service level agreements (SLAs) and service credits. Across a large portfolio, single overdue inspections add up to audit exposure that surfaces during HSE investigations or client reviews.

Which statutory compliance FM tasks have set intervals?

Among the areas covered here, LOLER thorough examinations, F-gas leak checks, and the landlord annual gas safety check for residential accommodation have intervals set in law. Most other intervals come from ACOPs, guidance, or standards. The table below separates the two for each area you need to track.

The Fire Safety Order and the L8 ACOP both ask for review "regularly" and after significant change. Building in an annual review gives you a fixed checkpoint. Add trigger reviews after a refit, a change of use, or a change in occupancy. Where a reasonably foreseeable risk of Legionella exposure can't be avoided, L8 expects a written scheme for controlling it, and monitoring records should be kept for at least five years.

What changed in BS 7671 in 2026?

Amendment 4 to BS 7671:2018 came out on 15 April 2026. The previous version is withdrawn from 15 October 2026, and Amendment 4 is the version electrical contractors work to. The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) confirms that older installations built to an earlier edition don't automatically breach the Electricity at Work Regulations.

Which newer laws affect FM compliance?

Two newer laws apply to specific building types, so check each site against their thresholds.

What does the Building Safety Act 2022 require?

The Building Safety Act 2022 sets duties for occupied higher-risk buildings in England. A higher-risk building is at least 18 metres tall or has at least seven storeys, and contains at least two residential units. Each higher-risk building has at least one Accountable Person, who must keep prescribed information about it up to date. Where a building has more than one Accountable Person, the Principal Accountable Person is the one who holds the legal estate in possession in the structure and exterior of the building, or has the repairing obligation for them. Government guidance calls this information the golden thread, and the Building Safety Regulator oversees the regime. If you maintain residential blocks, your job records feed that golden thread. Every inspection and remedial action needs to reach the Accountable Person in a usable form.

What will Martyn's Law require?

The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, known as Martyn's Law, covers qualifying premises: buildings wholly or mainly used for certain purposes listed in the Act, where it is reasonable to expect 200 or more people to be present at the same time. Premises where 800 or more people may be present are enhanced duty premises, and other qualifying premises are standard duty premises. The Act received Royal Assent on 3 April 2025, with an implementation period of at least 24 months. The government expects it to come into force in spring 2027, and the Security Industry Authority (SIA) will regulate it. The Home Office has published statutory guidance, and commencement will be set by regulations. Use the time to list which of your sites could reach 200 people and who will own the new duties at each one. Our guide, Martyn's Law: are you ready for spring 2027?, covers the tiers, duties and penalties in full.

What do FM providers need to prove to landlords and clients?

Landlords and clients expect proof that each statutory check in the table above happened on time, not only that it was scheduled. For each asset, hold the inspection certificate or report, the date, the engineer who carried it out, and evidence that any remedial action is closed. Record which duty holder owns each task, and whether its interval comes from law, guidance, or the contract.

Which compliance gaps put FM teams at risk?

Process gaps like these lead to missed inspections as your sites and contracts grow:

• Incomplete asset registers: if you don't know what assets a site holds, you can't schedule the right inspections
• Spreadsheet tracking: compliance dates managed outside your job management system are easy to miss and hard to audit across many sites
• Disconnected evidence: certificates stored in email inboxes or shared drives, away from the asset record
• Unlabelled intervals: schedules that copy a frequency without recording whether it comes from law, guidance, or the contract
• No clear ownership: when no one owns the compliance review cycle, overdue tasks go unnoticed until an audit or client review surfaces them

The pattern behind most of these gaps is the same: compliance tracking runs separately from job delivery, so the two records never fully align. Planned preventive maintenance (PPM) contracts show it most, because visit schedules, asset lists, and compliance evidence should move together and often drift apart.

How can you improve statutory compliance in facilities management?

Weak mobilisation can cause compliance problems. When a contract starts with an incomplete asset list, or with visit frequencies set without checking statutory requirements, the gaps last the whole contract term. Follow these steps to build a repeatable compliance process across your sites:

1. Audit your asset register: carry out an asset survey to confirm your register lists every asset that needs statutory inspection, with its location and regulation
2. Tag each task by source: record whether each interval comes from law, guidance, or your contract, so you can defend every frequency at audit
3. Align PPM schedules to statutory deadlines: set PPM schedules from legal requirements and risk assessments first, then add contract terms on top
4. Standardise evidence capture on site: use digital forms so engineers record the right information during the visit and the system stores certificates against the asset
5. Assign compliance ownership: name one person to review compliance status every week or every month
6. Act on compliance reports: treat overdue or at-risk inspections as priority jobs and book them in straight away

How does Joblogic help you manage statutory compliance?

The Joblogic computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) connects your asset register, PPM scheduling, mobile forms, and compliance reporting in one system. When you mobilise a PPM contract, you set each visit frequency in the schedule, including the statutory ones, so the visits are generated from the start.

With Joblogic, engineers capture inspection evidence on site through the mobile app, and the system stores each record against the asset in the asset maintenance software.

Lorne Stewart Facilities Services has cut out almost all of its paper use for maintenance tasks since moving to Joblogic, according to its case study.

In Joblogic, ad-hoc compliance jobs raised outside a PPM schedule follow the same structure. Each job links to the relevant asset, the engineer arrives with the right information, and the evidence sits with the rest of the asset's history. That consistency matters when an audit covers both planned and reactive work.

Joblogic's facilities management software keeps contracts, sites and assets in one system, so you can see job status, including overdue jobs, before a client review. Clients can check job status and review completed work through the customer portal on the Premium and Enterprise plans.

Joblogic keeps a full job history and audit trail against each job, which gives you a record for HSE inspections and contract renewals.

If you build schedules on SFG20, the SFG20 Facilities-iQ integration is a Joblogic Marketplace add-on, and you'll need your own SFG20 subscription to use it.

If you need a dedicated compliance tool, Joblogic Compliance (powered by Clik) is a separate product built for compliance management.

What should you do next to stay compliant?

In this guide, the law fixes intervals for LOLER thorough examinations, F-gas leak checks, and landlord gas safety checks in residential accommodation. For most other tasks, you choose the interval, and you need to show an inspector why it suits each asset and site. Start by tagging every task in your schedule as law, guidance, or contract. Then confirm your electrical contractors now work to Amendment 4, because the previous version is withdrawn from 15 October 2026. Finally, list the sites that could fall under Martyn's Law or the higher-risk building regime, and name the duty holder for each. Each of those checks is quicker when your assets, schedules, and certificates live in one place. If you'd like to see how that looks for your contracts, book a demo and one of our specialists will walk you through it.

FAQs

How often is an EICR needed for commercial premises?

No law sets a fixed EICR interval for commercial premises, and the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 require you to maintain systems to prevent danger. HSE's guidance for care homes states that there is no legal requirement for inspection and testing at set intervals. A competent person sets the interval for each installation, based on its type, use, and condition.

How often should fire alarms be serviced?

BS 5839-1 recommends that a competent person services your fire alarm system at intervals of no more than six months. Your fire risk assessment, insurer, or contract may set a shorter interval.

What records must an FM team keep for each statutory inspection?

For each statutory inspection, hold the inspection certificate, the engineer's sign-off, details of any remedial actions raised, and proof that those actions are complete. Store every record against the asset and keep it current, so you can show an asset's full compliance history in one view.

How do you manage statutory compliance across multiple sites without missing inspections?

Record every asset that needs a statutory inspection in one central register. Tie inspection frequencies to PPM schedules in your job management system, and name one person to review compliance status on a fixed cadence. When the system raises inspections automatically and engineers capture evidence on site, overdue tasks surface before they become breaches.

What software helps FM teams manage statutory compliance?

A computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) connects the asset register, PPM schedules, mobile forms, and compliance records, so evidence is stored against each asset. Joblogic offers this in one system, and its separate Compliance product (powered by Clik) adds certificate management with expiry alerts.

What happens if a statutory inspection is overdue at the time of an HSE audit?

An inspector can serve an improvement notice that requires you to fix the breach within a set time. Where there's a risk of serious personal injury, they can serve a prohibition notice. Ignoring either notice is a criminal offence, and prosecution can reach both the organisation and, in some cases, individual managers.