If you're responsible for a building — a school, a care home, a managed block, or a portfolio of rentals — a surprising amount of UK law lands on your desk. Most of it is unglamorous, none of it is optional, and the penalties for getting it wrong run from unlimited fines to, in the worst cases, prison.

This is the plain-English map of what actually has to be tracked, who's on the hook, and how often. It isn't legal advice — your specific duties depend on your buildings and how they're used — but it's the checklist most estates teams and landlords are working from.

The Responsible Person

Almost every regime below names a duty-holder: the person legally accountable. Under fire safety law it's the "Responsible Person"; under others it's the "duty-holder" or simply the owner/employer. The single most common failure isn't a missed certificate — it's nobody knowing who owns each obligation. Name the responsible person for every regime, per building, in writing.

The statutory regimes

Fire Risk Assessment (FRA)

Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the Responsible Person must ensure a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment is carried out and kept up to date. There's no single legal interval, but it must be reviewed regularly and whenever something changes — layout, occupancy, a near-miss. In practice most organisations review annually and re-assess after any material change. Findings (the action plan) matter as much as the assessment itself: an FRA with open high-risk actions is a liability, not a defence.

Gas safety

For rented residential property, the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 require an annual gas safety check on every appliance and flue by a Gas Safe registered engineer, recorded on a Landlord Gas Safety Record (the "CP12"). The tenant must be given a copy. This one is hard-dated and unforgiving — miss the annual deadline and you're non-compliant the day it lapses.

Electrical — EICR

In the private rented sector in England, the Electrical Safety Standards Regulations 2020 require fixed wiring to be inspected and tested at least every five years, with an Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR). Any C1 (danger present) or C2 (potentially dangerous) findings must be remediated within 28 days (or sooner if specified), with written confirmation. Commercial and institutional estates follow the same five-yearly rhythm as good practice under BS 7671.

Legionella (ACOP L8)

You have a duty to assess and control the risk of legionella in water systems under the Health and Safety at Work Act and COSHH, with the detail set out in ACOP L8 and HSG274. That means a legionella risk assessment, a written control scheme, and ongoing monitoring (temperature checks, flushing of little-used outlets, sampling where appropriate). The risk assessment should be reviewed periodically — commonly every two years, or sooner if the system or its use changes.

Asbestos

Under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012, the duty-holder for non-domestic premises (and the common parts of residential blocks) must manage the risk: find out whether asbestos is present, keep an asbestos register, assess the risk, and have a written management plan with periodic re-inspection. Any building constructed or refurbished before 2000 should be presumed to contain asbestos until proven otherwise.

Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) and MEES

An EPC is required whenever a property is built, sold or let, and is valid for ten years. Under the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES), it's generally unlawful to let a property with an EPC rating below E (with limited exemptions). Future tightening of the minimum rating has been signalled repeatedly, so treat your worst-rated stock as a planning problem, not just a certificate.

Lifts and lifting equipment (LOLER)

Passenger lifts and other lifting equipment require a thorough examination by a competent person under LOLER 1998 — typically every six months for equipment carrying people. The report goes on file; defects must be acted on.

Portable appliances (PAT)

There's no fixed legal interval for portable appliance testing. The law (the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989) simply requires electrical equipment to be maintained in a safe condition. Most organisations run PAT on a risk-based schedule and keep the records — the absence of a legal frequency is not an excuse for having no system.

Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms

In England, the Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm Regulations require at least one smoke alarm on every storey used as living accommodation, and a carbon monoxide alarm in any room with a fixed combustion appliance. Alarms must be checked to be in working order on the first day of a new tenancy, and repaired or replaced once a fault is reported.

HMOs carry more

Houses in Multiple Occupation are where residential compliance gets heavy. Larger HMOs (broadly, five or more occupiers forming two or more households) need a mandatory licence, and many councils run additional or selective licensing on top. Licences come with their own conditions — fire doors, emergency lighting, amenity standards, room sizes — enforced with fines up to £30,000 per offence, per property, plus rent repayment orders. If you hold HMOs, the compliance load per unit is several times that of a standard let.

Why it slips — and how to stop it

Almost no one fails on a single regime they've never heard of. Buildings fall out of compliance for boring reasons:

No owner. The obligation existed; nobody was named to it.
Dates in someone's head. Renewals tracked in a spreadsheet, or not at all, with no early warning.
Findings, not certificates. A certificate was filed, but the C2 remedial it flagged was never closed.
No paper trail. When the regulator asks, "show me," there's nothing to show.

The fix is unglamorous: one register of every building × regime, a named responsible person on each, computed next-due dates, escalating reminders well before expiry, and the underlying certificate and its findings attached. That's exactly what Proprietas does — drop in a certificate and it reads the dates, files it to the right property, and starts the clock — but the principle holds whether you use software or not.

If you want to see where you stand right now, you can run a free compliance scan on a certificate, or read more about how we track statutory compliance end to end.

UK property compliance: the complete guide for estates teams and landlords