Water safety for local authorities

A council is unusual: duty holder across a large and varied estate, and regulator of other people's water at the same time. The two jobs need different evidence.

Two duties, not one

As an employer and a person in control of premises, an authority carries the same ACoP L8 duties as any other organisation, across offices, depots, leisure centres, community buildings and social housing. That is the familiar half.

The other half is regulatory. Under the Private Water Supplies Regulations, local authorities must risk assess and sample the private water supplies in their area on a set cycle, and make returns to the Drinking Water Inspectorate. It is a statutory function with its own deadlines, and it is quite separate from looking after your own buildings.

Across the estate

Individually straightforward buildings. The difficulty is doing the same thing in all of them.

Council offices and depots – Mixed ages and occupancy levels, often with storage sized for a larger workforce.

Leisure centres and pools – Pool plant, spa facilities and high-volume showering in one building.

Maintained schools – Where the authority is the employer, the Legionella duty sits with the authority too.

Social housing and sheltered schemes – Landlord duties, plus residents who may be at higher risk.

Community and public buildings – Halls, libraries and centres used intermittently by third parties.

Parks and public conveniences – Outlying assets that rarely make it onto an estate-wide schedule.

The estate problem is consistency, not difficulty

Almost nothing on a council estate is technically hard. What is hard is doing it identically in two hundred buildings, evidencing it, and not losing the thread when a building changes use, a contract is retendered, or a responsible person leaves.

Members, auditors and insurers ask about the position across the estate, not about one building. Records that live in separate folders per site cannot answer that question. They need to aggregate, and the gaps need to be visible before someone else finds them.

Private water supplies are a separate workload

Risk assessments on a five-yearly cycle, sampling frequencies that depend on the type of supply and how many people it serves, and annual returns to the Drinking Water Inspectorate. Authorities in rural areas often have far more supplies than in-house capacity to cover them.

We carry out that work on behalf of authorities: the risk assessments, the regulatory sampling and the UKAS-accredited analysis behind it, in a form that goes straight into your returns.

Sampling and analysis

Social housing sits in the middle

As a landlord, an authority has the same Legionella duty as any private landlord, and runs into the same misunderstanding about what that duty actually requires. It is worth being clear about it in writing before a tenant, a contractor or a solicitor asks.

Legionella and landlords

One position across the whole estate.

Talk to us about estate-wide risk assessment, private water supply duties, or water management in your leisure centres.

For any enquiries or questions please call: 01707 527 069