Somewhere on your tail lift is a date - the next thorough examination - that half the industry treats as a service reminder and the other half ignores. It is neither. It is a statutory examination required by the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations, and the HSE’s guidance on thorough examinations spells out what that actually demands of the business whose name is on the vehicle.
HSE’s page on thorough examinations and inspections of lifting equipment explains the purpose: these checks are necessary to verify that the lifting equipment can continue to be safely used. That phrase - continue to be safely used - is the heart of it. A thorough examination is not a service, not a repair visit, and not a quick look while the fitter is there anyway. It is a systematic, detailed examination by a competent person, designed to catch deterioration before it becomes a failure under load.
The page anchors the duty precisely: it concentrates on thorough examination and inspection, and the reporting and record-keeping obligations of LOLER regulations 9, 10 and 11. Three regulations doing three jobs - the examination itself, the report of it, and the records that prove it happened. A tail lift with a current examination but no report trail is not compliance; it is an anecdote.
HSE’s guidance sets the examination intervals, and the two numbers that govern transport lifting gear are 6 months and 12 months. Which applies depends on the equipment and what it lifts - the detail sits in the guidance - but the pattern for the kit on trucks is familiar to anyone who has read the sticker: equipment used for lifting people sits at the shorter interval, and lifting accessories have their own place in the schedule. The operator’s job is not to memorise the matrix but to know which interval each piece of their equipment carries and to run the calendar from it.
Think about the lifting equipment a haulage business actually owns: tail lifts on rigids and artics, lorry-mounted cranes, vehicle-mounted forklifts hitching a ride to the delivery point, and the shackles, chains and slings in the box behind the cab. Each one is lifting equipment within LOLER’s world, and the accessories count too - the strap that is fine for load restraint is a different animal from the sling that lifts. The examination regime follows the equipment, not the vehicle, which is why the tail lift’s dates live in a different diary from the MOT’s.
Regulations 9, 10 and 11 make the paperwork as compulsory as the examination: the thorough examination happens, the report is made, and the records are kept. For a transport business the records have an extra life beyond the compliance file - they are the answer when a customer asks how you maintain your equipment, when an insurer asks after an incident, and when HSE asks after a reportable failure. The business that can produce a continuous examination history for every tail lift in the fleet answers those questions in an afternoon. The one that cannot has a bigger problem than the missing paperwork.
LOLER’s whole scheme rests on who examines. The thorough examination must be done by a competent person - someone with the practical and theoretical knowledge to detect defects and judge their seriousness, and independent enough to give an honest verdict. In practice most fleets meet that through specialist inspection companies, often bundled with insurer services. The point worth holding onto is what the arrangement is buying: not a date on a sticker but a genuinely independent judgement that the equipment is safe to keep using. Choose the examiner as carefully as you choose the mechanic - the examination is only as good as the person doing it.
The examination calendar is a backstop, not a substitute for eyes. Tail lifts live hard lives - kerb strikes, overloaded pallets, weather, the occasional forklift nudge - and damage does not wait for the next due date. The daily walkaround and the driver’s defect report are the first line: a lift that bangs, drifts or leaks gets reported and taken out of service, not nursed until its examination. LOLER’s thorough examination catches the deterioration nobody saw; the defect system catches what everybody can see. The law expects both to be working.
Treat lifting equipment examination like the safety inspection regime on the vehicles themselves: a named owner, a calendar per asset, and no equipment in service past its date. The tail lift is the machine your staff stand on, work under and trust with a tonne of someone else’s goods every day. Its thorough examination is the state checking that trust is still deserved - which is why it is law, and why the sticker’s date matters.