Legionella control for facilities management providers

You hold the contract and your client holds the duty. Water hygiene sits between the two, and it is the part of a hard services contract most likely to be examined by someone outside it.

Three parties, one duty

The legal duty for Legionella sits with your client, as the employer or the person in control of the premises. Taking on the contract does not move it to you, and bringing in a specialist does not move it to us. What each of us takes on is a defined part of the work, and HSE expects the duty holder to have checked the competence of whoever does it and to be able to show how.

That only holds up if the split is written down: who the responsible person is, who takes the readings, who reviews them, who decides when a result needs action, and who pays for the remedial work. Most of the problems we are asked to sort out began as a gap between a contract scope and a risk assessment.

Legionella control

Where it usually goes wrong

Rarely through neglect. Usually through tasks being completed without anyone reading the results.

Temperatures logged, not read – Out-of-range readings recorded month after month, with no action raised against them.

Flushing nobody can evidence – Carried out by whoever is on site, with no record an auditor would accept.

Risk assessments out of step – Written for the building as it was under the last contract, not as it is occupied now.

Remedials stuck in approval – Actions quoted, never instructed, and still open at the next assessment.

Assets missing from the register – Tanks, calorifiers and mixing valves that are on site but not in the CAFM system.

Sampling without a plan – Results arriving with nobody named to interpret them or decide what happens next.

Inside your PPM, not beside it

Most hard services contracts run on a planned maintenance schedule, often built on SFG20, and a CAFM system that proves the work was done. Water hygiene has to live inside both. A separate logbook in a plant room, on a different cycle from everything else, is how tasks get missed and how audits are failed.

We work to your schedule and your system: tasks raised and closed as your work orders, readings and certificates attached to the right asset, and exceptions reported in a form your helpdesk can act on. Where the frequencies in your schedule and the frequencies in the risk assessment disagree, we tell you, because the risk assessment is the one a regulator will read.

Temperature monitoring

We start from the water, not the plant

Water is the one building service that arrives as a regulated product and then has to be kept that way. Maintenance tends to treat it as plant: valves, pumps and vessels on a task list. That misses the question that matters, which is what the water is doing between the incoming main and the tap.

Our background is in public water supply, where sampling programmes, laboratory results and investigations are the daily work. When a temperature drifts or a sample comes back positive, we look for the cause in the system, not only for the next task on the list. That is the part a task list cannot supply, and it is the part that shows in an audit.

Sampling and analysis

Taking on a contract with no history

New contracts rarely arrive with good water records. The outgoing provider leaves, the logbooks go with them or were never complete, and you inherit sites where nobody can say when the tanks were last cleaned or whether the risk assessment still describes the building.

Mobilisation is the moment to deal with that, while the starting position is still the previous provider’s. We survey the water assets, check the existing risk assessments against the buildings, and give you a gap list ranked by risk. The first report you send your client can then state what you inherited and how it will be closed.

Surveys and risk assessments

What we take on

The whole water hygiene scope, or the specialist parts your own engineers do not cover.

Legionella risk assessments – To BS 8580-1, for a single site or across a whole portfolio.

Sampling and analysis – Planned and reactive, through UKAS-accredited laboratories.

Tank cleaning and chlorination – Cold water storage tanks cleaned and disinfected, with post-clean sampling and documentation.

TMV servicing – Thermostatic mixing valves cleaned, descaled and disinfected on schedule.

Temperature monitoring – Sentinel and representative outlets, read and reviewed, not just recorded.

Training for your engineers – So the routine tasks your own team keeps are carried out and recorded properly.

We work with

Whoever delivers the building services.

Total FM providers – Water hygiene as a specialist line inside a wider contract.

Hard services and M&E contractors – Support where water quality sits outside your engineers’ remit.

In-house estates teams – An independent assessment, or cover for the tasks you cannot resource.

Property and asset managers – Reporting that works at portfolio level as well as site by site.

Managing agents – Residential blocks and commercial buildings managed on behalf of their owners.

Multi-site occupiers – One standard across every building you operate.

A specialist inside your contract.

Talk to us about supporting an existing contract, mobilising a new one, or an independent review of where your water hygiene stands.

For any enquiries or questions please call: 01707 527 069