If you own, manage or maintain a building in the UK, a fixed set of inspections is not optional — it is the law, and the record of them is what auditors, insurers and fire authorities actually ask for. Here is the full list in one place.
When something goes wrong in a building — a fire, a gas leak, a lift entrapment — the first question is never "did you care about safety?". It is "show me the certificate, the date, and who signed it". UK building compliance is evidenced compliance: an inspection that exists only in someone's memory might as well not have happened. That is why the checklist below has three columns that matter equally: what, how often, and who is allowed to do it — and why the section after it is about keeping the records.
| Inspection | How often | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Gas safety check (CP12) — every gas appliance and flue in rented property | 12 months | Gas Safe registered engineer |
| Fixed electrical installation (EICR) — rented homes and, by BS 7671 guidance, commercial premises | 5 years | Qualified electrician (C&G 2391 or equivalent) |
| Fire alarm system — call point test, logged | Weekly | Trained on-site person; annual service by competent engineer to BS 5839 |
| Emergency lighting — short function test, plus annual full-duration test | Monthly | Trained on-site person; annual test to BS 5266 |
| Fire risk assessment — required for virtually all non-domestic and communal residential premises | Review yearly | Competent person / fire risk assessor |
| Fire doors — checks in flats' communal areas of buildings over 11m (Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022) | Quarterly / yearly | Responsible person (quarterly communal, best-endeavours yearly flat entrance) |
| Passenger lifts — LOLER thorough examination | 6 months | Competent person, usually via insurer's engineering inspection |
| Legionella — risk assessment plus routine temperature/flushing regime | Assess + monthly tasks | Competent person to ACoP L8; tasks can be in-house if trained |
| Asbestos management — register and re-inspection of known materials (pre-2000 buildings) | 12 months | UKAS-accredited surveyor for surveys; duty holder maintains register |
| Portable appliance testing (PAT) — frequency is risk-based, not fixed in law | Risk-based | Competent person; commonly yearly in offices, more often on sites |
Intervals shown are the statutory or standards-based norms checked against HSE and gov.uk guidance in August 2026. Your fire risk assessment, insurer or the inspection report itself can require shorter intervals — the shorter one always wins.
The law names a duty holder for each regime: the landlord for gas and rented-property electrics, the "responsible person" (owner, employer or managing agent) for fire, the duty holder for asbestos. Hiring a facilities management contractor delegates the work, not the duty. A well-drafted FM contract therefore lists every line of the table above, states who books it, who pays for it, and — most importantly — where the certificate lands afterwards. If your current contract doesn't, that is the first thing to fix at renewal.
Auditors ask by building. If your gas certificates live with the gas contractor, your lift reports with the insurer and the fire log in the plant room, producing a year of compliance takes days. Keep a single dated register per building with each certificate attached to its visit.
Every certificate states or implies its next due date. The failure mode is never "we didn't know gas checks are annual" — it is "nobody diarised this building's date". A planned preventive maintenance (PPM) schedule that generates the next task automatically removes the human step that fails.
Weekly fire alarm tests and monthly emergency-light flicks rarely have certificates — they have log entries. A dated photo of the panel or the lit luminaire, attached to the log line, turns "we say we did it" into evidence in two seconds.
If you are the FM contractor: a monthly statement per building — visits made, faults cleared, certificates renewed, what's due next month — is the cheapest client-retention tool that exists. Buildings change contractors over silence, not over price.
Graftum's maintenance desk holds the statutory checklist above as ready-made PPM schedules per building: tasks generate themselves on the right date, engineers attach photos and certificates from their phone, and the monthly client report writes itself. Built with London building-maintenance teams.
See the maintenance platform →Whoever has control of the premises — owner, landlord, employer or managing agent depending on the regime. You can contract the work out; you cannot contract the accountability out.
Invalidated insurance and failed audits first; unlimited fines and personal prosecution after incidents. Commercially, a gap in the record is treated as a missed inspection — even if the work happened.
Yes — the requirement is that records exist and can be produced. Dated digital records with the certificate attached are what modern auditors prefer to receive.
The annual inspections are: the gas safety check (CP12), the asbestos re-inspection on pre-2000 buildings, the fire risk assessment review, the full-duration emergency lighting test and the fire alarm service. Everything else runs on its own clock — weekly alarm tests, monthly lighting flicks, 6-monthly lift examinations, 5-yearly EICR.
Mostly yes. Fire risk assessment applies to virtually all non-domestic premises and communal areas of flats; gas and electrical duties apply to any rented home. Size changes the scale of the regime, rarely its existence.
Send us your current checklist and we'll tell you honestly what's missing — free, no strings. We build software for exactly this.
hello@graftum.com