Compliance
Is racking inspection a legal requirement in the UK?
Updated
The short answer: the duty to keep racking safe is legal, the annual expert inspection is not. Here is exactly where the line sits, and why that distinction matters when an auditor asks.
What the regulations require
Storage racking is treated as work equipment, which brings it within the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998. Regulation 5 requires work equipment to be maintained in an efficient state, in efficient working order and in good repair. Regulation 6 requires inspection where the safety of equipment depends on the conditions of its installation, or where it is exposed to conditions causing deterioration liable to result in a dangerous situation, with the result of that inspection recorded. Racking that is installed to a design and then hit by forklift trucks for years is close to the paradigm case for both.
Alongside that, the HSE's guidance HSG76 Warehousing and storage: a guide to health and safety covers racking as part of warehouse safety and expects damage to be identified and dealt with rather than left in service. The HSE's PUWER guidance is the plain-English companion to the regulations themselves.
What the regulations do not say
There is no statutory racking inspection interval in UK law. No regulation says annually, quarterly or weekly. If a supplier tells you that an annual inspection is a legal requirement, they are describing industry good practice as though it were statute. The recommendation is real and worth following; the legal framing is wrong, and getting it wrong is a poor foundation for a compliance decision.
So what are you actually expected to do?
- Have a regime, and be able to describe it. Who inspects, how often, against what criteria, and what happens when damage is found.
- Justify the frequency from the conditions on your site: traffic levels, aisle widths, forklift types, damage history, how heavily loaded the racking is and how recently it was reconfigured.
- Keep records. Regulation 6 requires the result of an inspection to be recorded and kept until the next inspection is recorded. In practice you want a located damage register, not a tick sheet.
- Act on what is found. An inspection report that identifies red risk damage and sits in a drawer is worse than no report, because it documents that you knew.
- Nominate someone competent to run the in-house checks, commonly described as the person responsible for rack safety.
Why the industry route is still the sensible one
The absence of a statutory interval is not permission to do nothing. If racking collapses, the question asked will be whether the duty holder took reasonably practicable steps, and the benchmark will be what competent operators in the sector do. That benchmark is an annual expert inspection with regular in-house visual checks between them. Following recognised industry guidance is how you show your regime was reasonable, which is precisely why the guidance is worth following even though it is not law.