What is PUWER? The Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations Explained

If you have ever searched for LOLER and found yourself reading about PUWER as well, that is not an accident. The two regulations are twins, written in the same year, and most people who need one need the other. The trouble is that PUWER quietly covers far more equipment than LOLER does, and it is the one businesses are most likely to think does not apply to them when it very much does.

PUWER stands for the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998. In plain terms, it requires that any equipment used at work is suitable for the job, safe to use, maintained in a safe condition, and used only by people who have been given the information, instruction and training to use it. That is the whole idea in a sentence. Nearly everything after this is detail.

What counts as work equipment

This is where PUWER’s reach surprises people. “Work equipment” is almost anything used by a worker at work. A hand drill is work equipment. So is a bench saw, a photocopier, a ladder, a forklift, a pillar drill, a knife in a kitchen, a mixer in a bakery, and the entire production line in a factory. If an employee uses it to do their job, PUWER almost certainly applies.

That breadth is the point. A business owner who assumes PUWER is “a factory thing” and does not apply to an office or a small workshop has usually misread it. The regulations scale to the risk, so a photocopier needs very little and a woodworking machine needs a great deal, but both sit under the same set of duties.

The core requirements, in plain terms

Strip out the legal wording and PUWER asks for a handful of things.

Suitable for the task. The equipment must be the right tool for the job and the environment. Using something in a way, or in a place, it was never designed for is where a lot of PUWER failures begin.

Maintained in a safe condition. Equipment has to be kept working safely, which means a maintenance regime appropriate to what it is and how hard it works. A maintenance log that stops two years ago is a classic finding.

Inspected where it matters. Where safety depends on the installation conditions or the equipment is exposed to conditions that cause deterioration, it must be inspected at suitable intervals by a competent person. This is not the same as the specialist thorough examination that LOLER demands, and confusing the two is common. More on that below.

Used by trained people. Anyone using the equipment, and anyone supervising or managing its use, needs adequate information, instruction and training. “He has used one before” is not a training record.

Risks from the equipment controlled. This is the physical protection layer. Dangerous parts need guarding. There need to be appropriate controls, including accessible stop and emergency stop controls, clear markings and warnings, adequate lighting, and protection against things like ejected material, overheating, or electrical hazard. Guarding a dangerous moving part is the single most recognisable PUWER duty, and the one whose absence causes the most serious injuries.

There are also more specific duties for particular hazards, for mobile work equipment such as anything that carries people or loads, and for power presses, which have their own detailed requirements.

Not something you want to get wrong — you can find health and safety consultants and contact them directly.

Practicable, not reasonably practicable

This is the part a surprising number of safety professionals get wrong, and it is worth doing properly, because it is exactly the sort of distinction that separates someone who understands the law from someone repeating a checklist.

Health and safety duties come at three different strengths, and the wording tells you which one you are dealing with.

An absolute duty uses words like “must” or “shall”. There is no argument to be had. If the law says a thing shall be done, you do it.

A reasonably practicable duty is the one you meet most often. It lets you weigh the risk on one side against the cost, time and trouble of controlling it on the other, and if the two are grossly disproportionate, if you would be spending a fortune to remove a trivial risk, you are allowed to stop. That balancing test was set out in Edwards v National Coal Board in 1949, and it is the everyday texture of modern safety decisions.

A practicable duty sits above that. “Practicable” means that if something can be done in the light of current knowledge and invention, it must be done, and cost is essentially not a defence. The only thing that excuses you is genuine impossibility given what is known at the time. That definition comes from Adsett v K&L Steelfounders in 1953, a case about extracting dust in a foundry, and it was reinforced by the House of Lords in Marshall v Gotham in 1954, about a roof fall in a mine. The gap between the two standards is real and it is deliberate. Under reasonably practicable you can be beaten by expense. Under practicable, expense is not the point.

Here is the part worth knowing. The practicable standard was the backbone of the old prescriptive legislation, the Factories Act 1961 and the Mines and Quarries Act 1954, which is precisely why the case law that defines it came out of factories and mines. Most of that legislation has since been swept away and replaced by the modern, goal-setting regulations we work to now, and almost all of those modern regulations are pitched at reasonably practicable. They set the outcome to be achieved and leave you to judge the proportionate way to get there.

PUWER regulation 11 is where the practicable standard survives. Among the regulations in force today, the duty to guard the dangerous parts of machinery is effectively the last place you will meet it. That is not an accident. We are talking about moving machinery where contact means an amputation or worse, and about engineering controls, fixed guards, interlocks, isolation, that are well understood and readily available. The law’s position is blunt. If the part can be guarded, it is guarded. “It was a bit expensive” is not an answer a court wants to hear after a hand has gone into an unguarded blade, and the wording of the regulation makes sure it never has to.

The practical upshot is that you should not bring reasonably-practicable, cost-balancing reasoning to machine guarding the way you might to other risks. The hierarchy, fixed enclosing guards first, then other guards and protection devices, then protection appliances such as jigs and push sticks, and information, instruction and training last of all, is worked strictly from the top down. You exhaust the higher, more reliable controls before you are allowed to lean on the weaker ones. You do not get to jump to “we told them to be careful” because fitting a guard was inconvenient.

PUWER and LOLER, the relationship worth understanding

Here is the bit people search for and rarely get a clean answer to.

PUWER covers all work equipment, including lifting equipment. LOLER, the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998, sits on top of PUWER and adds extra requirements specifically for equipment used for lifting and lowering loads. So a crane, a hoist, a passenger lift, a vehicle tail lift or a set of lifting slings must satisfy PUWER as a piece of work equipment and LOLER as lifting equipment.

The practical difference most people care about is examination. Under PUWER, equipment is inspected at suitable intervals decided by risk. Under LOLER, lifting equipment must have a thorough examination on a fixed statutory schedule by a competent person, and the intervals are set for you: as a general rule every six months for equipment used to lift people or for lifting accessories, and every twelve months for other lifting equipment, unless an examination scheme specifies otherwise.

So the rule of thumb is simple. If it lifts a load, you are in both PUWER and LOLER, and the LOLER examination schedule applies. If it does not lift, you are in PUWER, and you decide the inspection regime from the risk. Getting this wrong in either direction, treating a hoist as ordinary PUWER kit, or over-servicing a bench grinder on a LOLER schedule it does not need, is a genuinely common mistake.

Where PUWER compliance falls down

The failures are predictable once you have seen a few.

The first is guarding that has been removed and not replaced. A guard gets taken off to clear a jam or speed up a job, and it never goes back. That is not a paperwork problem, it is the exact circumstance that takes fingers off, and it is squarely a PUWER breach.

The second is the assumption of competence. Someone is put on a machine because they seem capable, with no actual instruction and nothing written down. When something goes wrong, there is no evidence anyone was ever trained, and the business carries the whole weight of it.

The third is second-hand and modified equipment. A machine bought used, or altered in-house, that no longer meets the standard it was built to, with nobody having checked whether the modification introduced a new danger. PUWER applies to the equipment as it is now, not as it left the factory.

The fourth is the inspection that never happens because nobody decided who owns it. PUWER leaves the interval to you, which sounds relaxed until you realise it also means there is no diary reminder unless you create one. “Risk based” quietly becomes “never” if nobody is responsible.

How PUWER fits with everything else

PUWER is one of the specific regulations beneath the Health and Safety at Work Act, and it works hand in hand with your general risk assessment duties. On construction projects it sits alongside CDM. For electrical work equipment it overlaps in practice with PAT testing and the electrical duties, which check the electrical safety of the same kit PUWER governs mechanically. And if your work also involves hazardous substances, the parallel regime is COSHH.

Related reading

For lifting equipment specifically, read What is LOLER alongside this, since almost everyone needs both. For electrical equipment safety, see PAT testing explained, and for the wider framework, the Health and Safety at Work Act and what a risk assessment is.

Getting the right help

Most PUWER problems are not exotic. They are a missing guard, a training record that does not exist, or an inspection regime nobody owns. A competent person walking your equipment and asking who trained the operator and when it was last checked will usually find them quickly, and fixing them is rarely expensive compared with the injury they prevent.

You can find health and safety consultants on My Safety Consultant, including our featured consultants, where their qualifications, professional memberships and company accreditations are set out on the profile. Contact them directly.

This guide is a plain English summary and is not a substitute for the current version of the PUWER or LOLER Regulations or for competent advice on your specific equipment and premises.

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