Almost every haulage depot runs lift trucks, and almost every depot underestimates them. Forklifts are involved in a disproportionate share of workplace transport accidents - overturns, pedestrian strikes, falling loads, falls from height - and they sit under a legal regime that many operators handle as an afterthought: a service from the dealer every few months and a vague sense that someone competent is driving. The Health and Safety Executive’s lift truck guidance draws hard lines that a lot of sites are on the wrong side of.
This guide sets out the framework: thorough examination, training, and the management controls that keep lift trucks from being your depot’s biggest risk.
The legal spine is two sets of regulations working together. Thorough examination of industrial lift trucks is required under health and safety law: LOLER 1998, which covers lifting equipment, and PUWER 1998, which deals with all other safety-related items such as brakes, steering and tyres. Between them, the whole truck - its lifting function and its road-going safety systems - sits inside a statutory examination regime.
The line HSE draws, and the one depots blur, is this: your regular inspections as part of a preventive maintenance scheme or scheduled service are not a thorough examination. A service maintains the truck; a thorough examination is an independent statutory check that it remains safe - closer in spirit to an MOT than to an oil change, carried out by a competent person at defined intervals. A depot that can produce service invoices but no thorough examination reports has not met the requirement, whatever the dealer told them.
The same discipline extends to attachments: the fork positioner, the clamp, the extension boom are lifting equipment too, inside the examination scope, not accessories that came free with the truck.
HSE’s lift truck guidance covers managing lift trucks and lift-truck training as distinct obligations, with approved codes of practice behind them - including L117, the rider-operated lift trucks code covering operator training and safe use. The principle is simple: nobody operates a lift truck without documented, adequate training for the truck type they drive, and the employer is responsible for making sure of it.
In practice the failures look like this: the agency driver handed keys because “he says he can drive one”; the warehouse supervisor who learned informally fifteen years ago; the driver trained on a counterbalance truck put straight onto a reach truck as if the skills transfer automatically. Each is a training gap the employer owns, and after an accident, “he seemed to know what he was doing” is not a defence - it is an admission.
Training records belong in the same regime as driver licence checks: verified at engagement, refreshed on schedule, specific to the equipment, and retained.
The managing lift trucks element of HSE’s guidance addresses the operating system around the machines. The classic depot accidents share root causes that management controls, not driver skill, determine. Pedestrian routes that cross truck aisles without segregation put people in the path of machines with poor visibility - the site layout decides whether the strike can happen. Speed inside buildings, racking struck by raised forks, trucks travelling with elevated loads, and passengers carried on forks or pallets are all procedural failures, every one foreseeable and every one addressed by site rules that are trained, posted and enforced.
Loading docks concentrate the risks: trucks working trailer edges, dock plates, and the gap between vehicle and bay. The trailer creeps, the plate slips, the truck drops - all within the normal operation of a busy depot unless the procedures prevent it. Vehicle parking brakes, trailer supports, dock restraints and a no-entry rule under raised forks are the controls; their absence is the risk assessment’s most urgent page.
A depot that takes lift trucks seriously has five things on paper and in practice. Statutory thorough examinations under LOLER and PUWER, diarised and evidenced, distinct from servicing. Documented training per operator per truck type, with refreshers. Site rules covering speed, pedestrians, load travel position and no riders - enforced by supervisors who would stop a truck driven by their own manager. Equipment matched to the work, because the wrong truck driven creatively is an accident developing. And incident and near-miss reporting that captures the strikes and tip-overs that did not quite happen, while they are still free lessons.
The forklift is the most dangerous vehicle in most depots precisely because it is the most familiar. Treat it with the same legal and managerial seriousness as the trucks on the road - the law already does.