Notes
Written down,
so you can judge it.
Short pieces on the duties organisations carry and the work of discharging them. No client names and no case studies. Just what we think, set out so you can judge whether we are worth a conversation.
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Reviewed 10 September 2026
What belongs in an obligations register, and who owns each line
Most registers are a list of regulations. A useful one is a list of duties, each with a holder, an evidence requirement and a frequency. Building it usually turns up two or three duties nobody had.
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Reviewed 10 September 2026
Why compliance findings do not get closed out
Six months after the audit the schedule is still a schedule. The reasons are structural, not lazy. An assessment that is never closed is a documented liability, not an improvement.
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Reviewed 10 September 2026
Evidence that stays true: compliance records as data, not a folder tree
A folder of certificates is only current in the week before an audit. Holding the same information as structured data changes what the organisation can answer, and when.
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Reviewed 10 September 2026
The regulation 4 duty to manage asbestos, in an industrial building
The duty sits with whoever holds the repair obligation, it covers plant as well as fabric, and it is discharged by a written plan, not by a survey in a drawer. It is also the duty most often assumed to belong to somebody else.
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Reviewed 10 September 2026
ESOS phase 4: what qualifies you, and why the date to watch is 31 December 2026
Qualification is decided on a single day, and the compliance deadline is eleven months later. Organisations that start when the deadline appears in a diary have already lost the year of energy data the audit needs.
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Reviewed 10 September 2026
Golden thread: what the Act requires, and what people mean when they borrow the term
It is a specific duty attaching to higher-risk buildings, not a general principle of good record-keeping. Most industrial clients hold no building in scope, and are still caught by the dutyholder regime that arrived alongside it.
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Reviewed 10 September 2026
There is no such thing as annual PAT testing
The Electricity at Work Regulations require maintenance, not testing, and say nothing about frequency, labels or a man with a machine. Almost every organisation is doing either too much of it or the wrong parts.
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Reviewed 10 September 2026
PUWER inspection, LOLER thorough examination, and the insurance visit that is neither
Three different things share a diary entry in most factories. The intervals are set out in regulation 9 of LOLER, the duty belongs to the employer, and the engineer who turns up from the insurer is not automatically discharging it.
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Reviewed 10 September 2026
DSEAR and the dust nobody classified
Flammable liquids get assessed. Dust often does not, even though DSEAR treats it the same way, with its own set of zones, and even though the material causing the problem is usually flour, sawdust or aluminium.
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Reviewed 10 September 2026
"Competent person" is not a qualification
The phrase appears across a dozen regimes and means something slightly different in each. What it never means is a certificate, and the duty to satisfy yourself sits with whoever appoints.