LOLER ACOP L113 Explained: Planning & Risk Assessment

If you have ever tried to work out what LOLER actually requires you to do, you will have discovered that the regulations themselves are eleven short paragraphs of legal text. The practical detail lives somewhere else: L113, the HSE's Approved Code of Practice and guidance for LOLER 1998 — full title "Safe use of lifting equipment". This guide explains what L113 is, the unusual legal weight an ACOP carries, and what it says about the two things sites get wrong most often: planning lifting operations and risk assessment.

What is L113?

L113 is the HSE's official companion document to the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998. It reprints each regulation and follows it with two kinds of material: ACOP text (the Approved Code of Practice itself) and guidance. The distinction matters. The document is free to download from the HSE website, and if lifting equipment is used in your business, someone in your organisation should have read it.

What "ACOP Status" Actually Means

An Approved Code of Practice has a special legal status that ordinary guidance does not. If you are prosecuted for a breach of health and safety law and it is proved you did not follow the relevant ACOP, the court will find you at fault unless you can show you complied with the law in some other, equally effective way. Lawyers call this "semi-legal" status: the ACOP is not itself law, but ignoring it reverses the burden — you must prove your alternative approach was as good.

In practice, that means L113 is the default standard a court, an HSE inspector, or a principal contractor's auditor will judge your lifting arrangements against. Departing from it is legally possible but commercially and evidentially brave.

What L113 Says About Planning

Regulation 8 requires every lifting operation to be properly planned by a competent person, appropriately supervised, and carried out in a safe manner. The ACOP text expands each phrase:

• "Properly planned" — the plan must address the risks identified by risk assessment and identify the resources, procedures and responsibilities required. For routine, repetitive lifts the planning may only need to be done once, but it must be reviewed to check nothing has changed — the exact territory covered in our guide to generic lift plans.
• "Competent person" — someone with adequate practical and theoretical knowledge and experience of the lifting operations to be planned. L113 does not name a qualification; UK construction fills the gap with the CPCS A61 Appointed Person.
• "Appropriately supervised" — supervision proportionate to the risk, by people with the authority to stop the work.

L113 also lists the factors the plan should address — the weight and centre of gravity of the load, the working radius, the environment, the personnel — which map directly onto the nine parts of a lift plan.

LOLER Planning and Risk Assessment: How They Fit Together

This is the point most sites muddle. LOLER does not contain a standalone duty to risk assess — that duty comes from the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. L113 makes the relationship explicit: the risk assessment identifies the hazards of the lifting operation, and the lift plan is the output of planning done to control them. They are not the same document and one cannot substitute for the other:

• The risk assessment asks: what could cause harm here — the load, the equipment, the ground, the people, the environment?
• The lift plan answers: here is precisely how this lift will be done so those risks are controlled — this machine, this configuration, this radius, this rigging, these people, this sequence.

A generic risk assessment with no lift-specific planning fails Regulation 8; a lift plan with no underlying assessment of site-specific hazards fails the Management Regulations. Principal contractors reject submissions for both, usually bundled with the RAMS — see our guide to lifting method statements and RAMS.

The Other L113 Duties Worth Knowing

• Thorough examination (Regulations 9–10) — lifting equipment examined by a competent person at statutory intervals; accessories every 6 months where used to lift people or as accessories, equipment generally every 12. Covered in our plain-English LOLER guide.
• Marking (Regulation 7) — safe working loads marked and legible.
• Strength and stability (Regulation 4) — including the ground the machine stands on, which is why outrigger loadings and mats appear in every competent lift plan.

Complying in Practice

The gap between L113 and a compliant site is not knowledge — the document is free — it is application: someone competent turning "properly planned" into an actual plan for an actual lift. That is the work we do every day: site-specific lift plans from £200, independent plan checking, and lifting operation audits that measure your arrangements against L113 and BS 7121 before an inspector or a principal contractor does.