Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessment.

Approximate Reading Time: 12 minutes.

Legal Obligation.

A Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessment, just like a Landlords Gas Safety Certificate, is a legal requirement that every landlord must comply with.

Unlike the Landlord's Gas Safety Certificate that is relatively well known by the majority of landlords and tenants alike, very few people are aware that all landlords must provide this document to their tenants before they move into a property.

Certain properties may have specific requirements that if not complied with, will put the property at a higher risk of a Legionnaires Disease Outbreak.   Unless the landlord provides their tenant with this information, how can the tenant be expected to take the required precautions to ensure the property remains a low-risk property?

Also a tenants personal situation may make the property a higher risk to them in particular?   Some of the factors to consider that increase the risk are;

How Is A Landlord Defined?

A landlord is defined as someone that accepts payment in exchange for providing accommodation.

According to the Health & Safety website if you have a spare room that you allow a friend to stay in, if you host language students for a week or two a year, or if you provide a complete property to someone, the moment you accept any form of payment for this accommodation, as far as the law is concerned, you are a landlord and as such must comply with all of a landlords legal obligations.

(I will provide links to the Health & Safety website at the bottom of this post for your reference.)

Who Can Undertake A Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessment?

Unlike a Landlords Gas Safety Certificate that can only be completed by someone that is, firstly on the Gas Safe Register and secondly, has the appropriate categories/appliances on their gas safe card to undertake that work.

According to the Health & Safety website, a Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessment can be undertaken by anyone that is 'Competent'.

You may find it interesting to note that, whilst the Health & Safety state you may do this assessment yourself, providing you are competent, they then specifically state that you should make sure any redundant pipework identified is removed.

Are You Competent Yourself?

I strongly recommend you take a moment to look around your property.

Look at all the pipework in the airing cupboard, under sinks, behind the washing machine, in the loft, etc.

Can you confidently identify the purpose of every pipe in your property?

If you are currently unable to identify the purpose of each pipe with 100% confidence, you will be unable to identify which pipes are 'redundant' and I would suggest you consider yourself not to be competent to undertake an assessment.

How Can You Tell If Someone Is Competent?

I can use myself as an example of this.   At the age of 16, I started a four-year apprenticeship to become a plumber.   Upon completion of this apprenticeship, I worked for a company that specialised in the disinfection, sterilisation and replacement of cold water storage cisterns for the purpose of Legionnaire's Disease Prevention.   This work took place at several medical premises in and around Eastbourne.

At this time the Legionnaires disease prevention requirement was only for larger water systems and was not required by domestic landlords.

Sometime later the Health & Safety legislation was amended, removing the minimum size limit for installations that need to be assessed.

This meant that all residential landlords, even those whose property has a combination boiler, were now obliged to have an assessment completed on their property.

Having had a look online at this time to see which of the local tradesmen had the formal qualification for 'Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessments', I noticed that there were very few locally.   With this potential gap in the market place, I decided to go back to college to update my knowledge in this area and gain a formal qualification for Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessments.

Let's have a quick look at this a little closer.   Here we have myself, a plumber that has completed a four-year apprenticeship.   I had been trained in the disinfection, sterilisation and prevention of legionnaires disease by my employer.   After this I obtained an additional 26 years experience in Plumbing, ensuring that each job I completed, was in full compliance with current water regulations.   You may think that going to college to complete a 'Voluntary' course on ‘Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessments' would be a waste of time considering my past experience.

To be honest, I thought that at first too. I had all this experience working on plumbing systems and even specific training for Legionnaires disease prevention, the very topic this course targets.   Training for this course wasn't local, it was a six-hour round journey' which obviously didn’t include the time to do the course itself.

Personally, I believe in the theory that if you are going to do something, 'do it correctly or not at all'.   It had been a few years since I had done any legionnaire's prevention work, if nothing else, I thought it would be a refresher course as there must have been a couple of changes to the regulations.

About an hour into the course I realised that, had I not come to this course, there is no way I would have been 'competent' to complete a Legionnaire's Disease Risk Assessment.   Yes, I was a plumber with many years of experience working in full accordance with the current water regulations.   Yes, I had been specifically trained in legionnaire's disease prevention upon completion of my apprenticeship, albeit a number of years ago, yet the fact remained that had I not undertaken the course, I would NOT have been competent.

Water Regulations.

Water regulations are the requirements that must be met when installing plumbing systems.   These are different from Legionnaire's disease prevention requirements set out by Health & Safety.

Just because a plumber is qualified to undertake work in accordance with the current water regulations, doesn't mean they will be competent to complete a Legionnaire's Disease Risk Assessment.

There are instances where, if you complete an installation in full accordance with the current water regulations, you will be in contravention of the Health & Safety's legionnaires disease prevention guidelines.

For this reason, a plumber who holds the Water Regulations qualification but not the Legionnaires Disease Prevention qualification may not be competent in this area.

What Happens If A Fault Is Found?

As a landlord, you MUST have a Legionnaire's Disease Risk Assessment completed on your property, this is a legal requirement.

However, if a fault is identified, you are under no legal obligation to have the rectification work carried out!

That being said, if your assessment has identified any cause for concern and you do not rectify the situation, by choosing to ignore these risks, if a legionnaire's outbreak occurs at your property, you will be liable for prosecution from the Health & Safety, for failing to protect your tenant from the risks you were made aware of in the assessment.

Potential Consequences Of An Outbreak.

A potential scenario may help you here in deciding your best course of action if your assessment discovers something that doesn't comply with the current legionnaire's disease prevention guidelines.

Let's say you rent your property to a Gas Engineer.   The engineer contracts legionnaires disease and the source is traced to your property.

Your tenant is now in the hospital being treated for legionnaires disease.   They are in the hospital for two weeks and then sent home to rest for another four weeks to recover.   This means your tenant has had six weeks off work as a result of contracting legionnaires disease from your property.

Fast Forward To The Court Appearance!

Your tenant has lost out on 6 weeks income.   As a gas engineer myself, my hourly rates are £60.00 per hour.   Without getting into specific numbers, I think it's safe to agree that if we use £1,000.00 per week to calculate the gas engineers claim for loss of earnings, we are definitely on the lower side of their potential claim!

Your tenant is claiming for their loss of earnings during their illness. This is £6,000.00.   I don't think anyone reading this would disagree that in this scenario, there would be no disputing the fact that your tenant would win this claim for loss of earnings.

In addition to this, they are also claiming compensation for the fact they contracted this illness whilst in your property because you failed to correct the defects that were identified when the property was assessed.

Once again, I don’t think anyone will disagree that, in this scenario, the tenant would win their claim for contracting this illness in your property.   Their illness would not be in dispute.   Their time off work would not be in dispute and the source of the outbreak would have been confirmed by a Health & Safety Investigation to be at your property.   In this scenario, the only thing we are unable to be sure of, is how many thousands of pounds, on top of their loss of earnings (£6,000 in this example) your tenant would win in compensation?

Please don't forget that there will be a subsequent prosecution form the Health & Safety Executive for a breach of legionnaires disease prevention guidelines, which will almost certainly result in a fine and quite possibly a prison sentence.

Who Would I Choose To Undertake This Work?

Personally, I find it very difficult to not see the value in employing someone that has completed the specific Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessment course and can show you their qualifications that prove their competence in this area?

The various links at the bottom of this blog show that a Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessment is indeed a legal requirement.

A quick search of google shows that outbreaks are not uncommon, (there was a death in the UK last year where the individual contracted Legionnaires Disease from a garden hose.) and that there are indeed prosecutions resulting from this legislation.

How To Avoid All Blame?

If you employ someone with a Legionnaires Disease Prevention qualification.

If you ensure that it was awarded by a recognised governing body, such as City & Guilds.

If you request the completed document had a signed declaration from the assessor, confirming that they are indeed competent and quoting their specific qualification.

If you have any faults discovered rectified and adhere to any recommendations.

Provided these steps have been taken, if a Legionnaires Disease outbreak occurs at your property, the liability falls on the plumber that completed the assessment.

Did you seek out and employ a qualified individual?   Yes!

Did you verify their qualifications?   Yes!

Did you take all reasonable steps possible to task this work to a professional?   Yes!

Provided you done all the above, you are not to blame in any way!

Personally, I always choose a S.Y.S.T.E.M. (Save, Yourself, Stress, Time, Energy, Money) whenever possible. In this instance, a system will Save, Yourself, a lot of Stress, a lot of Time, a lot of Energy and a lot of Money in avoiding any court proceedings should an outbreak arise at your property.

For the sake of the £60.00 (Plus the cost of our book, a link to this can be found on this page) it would cost to have an assessment completed by a City & Guilds Approved, Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessor in Eastbourne, I find it hard to see why anyone would risk putting themselves through the potential scenario mentioned above?

Living Document.

A Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessment is referred to as a living document.

This means that whenever you have any plumbing work carried out at your property, this document is updated to reflect any alterations to the plumbing system.

Simple tasks like replacing a washer would not trigger a re-assessment, however installing new taps may trigger a re-assessment if the pipework is altered in any way, particularly if the alteration involves the installation of pliable tap connectors.

Once an assessment has been completed, your best course of action would be to ensure you only employ plumbers that are Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessors, as this will ensure that all work is completed in full accordance with Legionnaires Disease Prevention Requirements.

When it comes to updating the plumbing at your property with new bathrooms, kitchens, sinks, basins, etc.   If you also only use plumbers that, in addition to the Legionnaires Qualification, have also demonstrated their knowledge of the Water Regulations under examination conditions, you can be sure all work will comply with both Water Regulations and Legionnaires Disease Prevention guidelines.

Another important aspect of the 'Living Document' is when you change tenants.   If you had a property and it posed no risk to a young healthy couple that was living there.   This doesn't mean that it will not pose a risk to the new tenant.

Don't forget, as mentioned earlier in this post, individuals with medical issues such as asthma, chronic kidney disease, heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes, etc, are all at a higher risk of contracting Legionnaires Disease and the risks need to be managed accordingly.

Summary:

Referencing:

(Each of these links opens in a new window.)

The first link below refers to the requirements for a landlord relating to a Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessment.

This link also refers to the assessor's ability to identify any redundant pipe-work, or as they state (in their bullet points halfway down the page); make sure any redundant pipework identified is removed.

Health & Safety Website

This second link below refers to a landlords obligations relating to Gas Safety, However it does indicate how the Health & Safety define a Landlord.

Health & Safety Website

This third link refers to your option to appoint a 'Responsible Person' to undertake this work on your behalf:

Health & Safety Website

I hope this has provided you with a more in-depth view of the benefits of contracting a City & Guilds Approved Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessor.

If you live in Eastbourne and you would like to have your property assessed by a City & Guilds Approved Legionnaires Disease Risk Assessor, click the red button below to start making your appointment now!

Legionnaires Risk Assessments

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