Compliance Services and Associated Works DPS

Inprova offers three solutions that cover compliance-related services: this DPS, the Compliance Solutions framework, and the Fire Safety Works framework. They serve different needs and can be used alongside each other.

This DPS is the broadest, covering 17 categories including heating, electrical, fire safety, asbestos, legionella, lifts, access control, mansafe, Japanese knotweed, and radon. It has an open supply chain where new suppliers can join at any time, and you set your own pricing and terms for each procurement through further competition.

The Compliance Solutions framework provides a fixed supply chain with pre-agreed pricing and ranked suppliers. It can be accessed through direct award or mini-competition, which is faster than a DPS competition for straightforward requirements. The Fire Safety Works framework is a dedicated solution for fire safety installation and remediation, with 41 evaluated suppliers across 7 specialist lots including active works, passive works, fire doors, and cladding.

The choice depends on the requirement. For a straightforward electrical testing programme where speed of appointment matters, the Compliance Solutions framework’s direct award route may be faster. For a complex, multi-category compliance programme where you want to tailor the specification and test the market competitively, the DPS provides more flexibility. For specialist fire safety works, the dedicated framework provides the deepest supply chain. Our team can advise on the most appropriate route for each specific need.

In Great Britain, the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 require all employers and building managers to assess and control the risk of legionella in water systems, with equivalent duties in Northern Ireland under its own health and safety framework. The HSE Approved Code of Practice L8 provides the practical guidance in Great Britain, and the associated technical guidance document HSG274 sets out the monitoring, testing, and treatment requirements, with the Health and Safety Executive for Northern Ireland providing equivalent guidance there.

Every building with a hot and cold water system, cooling tower, spa pool, or other water feature needs a legionella risk assessment. The assessment must be reviewed at least every two years, or whenever significant changes are made to the water system or building use. Where the assessment identifies risk, ongoing monitoring, water treatment, and temperature management are required to keep the system within safe parameters.

This DPS covers both legionella testing and legionella treatment. Testing includes risk assessments, water sampling, laboratory analysis, and reporting. Treatment includes chemical dosing, thermal disinfection, system cleaning, and the ongoing water hygiene management that keeps your buildings compliant between assessments.

For organisations managing large building portfolios, legionella compliance involves dozens or hundreds of individual water systems, each requiring regular attention. Procuring testing and treatment through the DPS provides a compliant route to specialist water hygiene contractors with the technical competence that the relevant health and safety guidance requires.

Multi-academy trusts are responsible for building compliance across every school in the trust, which can mean dozens of buildings, each with its own electrical systems, heating plant, water systems, fire safety measures, and asbestos profile. The scale of the compliance programme is significant, and the procurement challenge is finding specialist contractors who can deliver testing, servicing, and remediation across a geographically dispersed estate within the budget and timescales that the trust operates under.

Our DPS covers every category of compliance that a school building requires: electrical testing and maintenance, heating servicing, fire risk assessments, fire alarm and emergency lighting maintenance, legionella testing and treatment, asbestos surveying and removal, and lift servicing. Each category can be procured separately or combined into a multi-category compliance contract depending on how the trust wants to structure its programme.

For MATs, the DPS provides a procurement route that works at portfolio scale. Rather than each school arranging its own compliance contractors through ad-hoc purchasing, the trust can run a single competition through the DPS that covers all sites. This delivers consistent standards, better pricing through volume, and a single contractual relationship to manage. Inprova’s team can support the specification development for a multi-site compliance programme, ensuring that the tender documentation captures the specific requirements of each building within the trust’s estate.

The Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 (LOLER) require that all lifting equipment in Great Britain, including passenger lifts, cargo lifts, platform lifts, and stairlifts, is subject to periodic thorough examination by a competent person, with the equivalent Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations (Northern Ireland) 1999 imposing the same duty there. For lifts carrying people, this examination must be carried out at least every six months. Both sets of regulations also require that lifts are properly maintained in safe working condition.

Our DPS covers both lift installation and lift servicing and maintenance. Installation covers the design, supply, and commissioning of new lifts in high-rise and low-rise buildings, including passenger lifts, cargo lifts, and platform lifts. Servicing covers the ongoing maintenance, routine testing, and LOLER thorough examinations that keep existing lifts operational and compliant.

For organisations managing buildings with multiple lifts, the servicing contract is a significant ongoing commitment. Lift breakdowns affect building accessibility, particularly for disabled users and in higher-risk settings such as hospitals, care homes, and high-rise buildings where lifts are the only practical means of vertical circulation. Procuring lift servicing through the DPS allows you to select contractors based on their response times, their experience with your type of lift equipment, and their capacity to maintain a fleet of lifts across multiple buildings.

The defence estate includes some of the most diverse building types in the UK public sector: barracks, workshops, hangars, storage facilities, training centres, accommodation blocks, offices, and specialist operational buildings. Each has compliance obligations that mirror those of any other building, including electrical testing, heating servicing, fire safety, legionella, asbestos, and lift maintenance. Many defence buildings also have additional requirements around mansafe systems for roof access and access control for security.

Our Compliance DPS covers all of these categories and is available to the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, individual armed forces commands, and other MOD bodies responsible for estate compliance. For defence organisations, the ability to procure compliance services through a DPS that has already been established as a compliant procurement vehicle reduces the administrative burden of setting up individual procurements for each compliance category on each site.

The mansafe category is particularly relevant for defence buildings where maintenance access to roofs, elevated structures, and specialist equipment requires permanent fall protection systems. Guard rails, roof anchors, and demarcation systems all need to be installed, inspected, and maintained to meet the Work at Height Regulations. Our DPS provides the procurement route for the specialist contractors who deliver this work, with Inprova’s post-award due diligence providing the additional assurance that defence estate managers need for contractors working on secure sites.

The Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 in England, Scotland, and Wales, or the Control of Asbestos Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2012, place a duty on anyone responsible for maintaining non-domestic buildings to manage the risk from asbestos. This duty to manage includes identifying where asbestos-containing materials are present, assessing their condition, managing the risk through monitoring or removal, and ensuring that anyone working on the building is informed about the location and condition of asbestos.

Before any refurbishment or demolition work, a refurbishment and demolition (R&D) survey is required to identify all asbestos-containing materials that could be disturbed by the works. This is a more intrusive survey than a standard management survey and must be carried out by a competent surveyor.

The DPS covers both asbestos surveying and testing and asbestos removal. Surveying includes management surveys, R&D surveys, bulk sampling, and air monitoring. Removal covers licensed removal (for high-risk materials such as asbestos insulation board and sprayed coatings), non-licensed removal (for lower-risk materials such as cement products), and associated disposal and air clearance testing.

For organisations planning capital works programmes, procuring asbestos surveys through the DPS before the works begin ensures that the scope and cost of any asbestos management is understood before the construction contractor is appointed. This avoids the delays and additional costs that arise when asbestos is discovered unexpectedly during works.

NHS trusts and health boards manage some of the most compliance-intensive buildings in the public sector. Hospitals operate 24 hours a day, house vulnerable patients, contain specialist medical equipment, and have complex water, electrical, and heating systems. The compliance programme for a hospital campus typically involves hundreds of individual testing, servicing, and maintenance activities each year, spread across multiple buildings and dozens of compliance categories.

Our Compliance solutions DPS covers every core compliance category that a hospital requires: electrical testing for clinical and non-clinical areas, heating servicing including specialist medical gas systems, fire risk assessments and fire safety equipment maintenance, legionella testing and treatment for complex water systems with multiple outlets, asbestos management for buildings constructed before 2000, and lift servicing for patient, visitor, and cargo lifts.

Healthcare buildings have specific compliance requirements that go beyond the baseline legal requirements that apply to all buildings. In England, the Health Technical Memoranda (HTM) series sets this out, with HTM 06 covering electrical services, HTM 04 covering water systems including legionella management, and HTM 05 covering fire safety. NHS Scotland follows its own Scottish Health Technical Memoranda series covering the same ground, with NHS Wales and Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland setting their own equivalent estates guidance. Contractors working in NHS environments need to understand the standards relevant to your nation and deliver their services in a way that minimises disruption to clinical operations.

Because the DPS uses further competition for each procurement, you can include your nation’s estates guidance requirements in the specification and evaluate contractors on their healthcare experience alongside their technical competence.

Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas that enters buildings from the ground. It is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the UK after smoking, and Public Health England (now UKHSA) estimates it causes around 1,100 lung cancer deaths per year. Building owners have a duty under health and safety legislation to assess and manage radon exposure in the workplace.

Testing is recommended for all buildings in radon-affected areas, which are defined by postcode-level mapping published by UKHSA. Parts of south-west England, the East Midlands, the Peak District, Northamptonshire, and parts of Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland have elevated radon levels. The action level is 200 becquerels per cubic metre for domestic properties, and 300 becquerels per cubic metre for workplaces under the Ionising Radiations Regulations 1999..

The DPS covers radon testing and monitoring (Category 17). Testing involves placing passive detectors in the building for a period (typically three months) and sending them for laboratory analysis. Where levels exceed the action level, mitigation measures such as radon sumps, positive ventilation, or sealing are required to reduce concentrations to acceptable levels.

For organisations managing property portfolios in radon-affected areas, systematic testing is the first step. The DPS provides the procurement route for the specialist testing and monitoring services that identify which buildings need mitigation and which are within safe limits. Inprova’s team can help you design a testing programme based on your estate geography and prioritise the buildings at highest risk.

Yes. Leisure centres and swimming pools present specific compliance challenges that go beyond standard building compliance. The water systems in swimming pools, spa pools, and associated shower and changing facilities are high-risk environments for legionella because of the warm water temperatures, aerosol generation, and high throughput of users. The legionella testing and treatment categories on this DPS cover all of these water system types.

Swimming pools also require electrical testing for the specific hazards associated with water and electricity in close proximity, heating system maintenance for pool heating and ventilation plant, fire safety systems, and access control. Our DPS covers all of these categories.

For local authorities managing leisure estates, whether directly or through leisure trusts, the DPS provides a single procurement route for the full range of compliance services across these complex buildings. Many leisure centres were built in the 1970s and 1980s and contain ageing mechanical and electrical systems that require regular testing and maintenance to remain safe. The open supply chain on the DPS means you can access specialist leisure facility compliance contractors who may not be available on more general procurement routes.

Access control covers door entry systems, automatic opening doors, security barriers, gates, and all associated installation, servicing, and maintenance. For blue light organisations managing police stations, custody suites, control rooms, and evidence stores, access control is not just a convenience feature. It is a security and safety requirement that directly affects operational capability.

Custody suites have specific access control requirements to manage detainee movement, maintain staff safety, and comply with the relevant custody standards, PACE Code C in England and Wales, Police Scotland’s own detention standards under the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2016, or the PACE (Northern Ireland) Order 1989 codes of practice in Northern Ireland. Control rooms require secure access to protect sensitive systems and data. Evidence stores require auditable access control to maintain the chain of custody for evidential material.

Our DPS allows you to procure access control services with specifications tailored to these operational requirements. Because each procurement is a further competition, you can include the specific security and operational standards that your buildings require in the specification, and evaluate contractors on their experience working in secure environments. This is important because a contractor who services access control in office buildings may not have the experience or security awareness needed for custody suite or control room environments.

Inprova’s post-award due diligence checks provide additional assurance around contractor suitability before work begins on sensitive sites. For blue light organisations where contractor access to secure areas needs to be carefully managed, this layered approach to supplier verification is a practical benefit.

Hospices, community centres, places of worship, and other charity-managed buildings have exactly the same building compliance obligations as any other occupied property. The legal requirements around electrical testing, gas safety, fire risk assessment, legionella, and asbestos do not distinguish between a commercial office and a hospice. The difference is that charities typically have smaller estates teams, less procurement resource, and tighter budgets, which means the compliance programme needs to be delivered efficiently or it risks falling behind.

Hospices managing clinical environments have additional compliance considerations. Medical gas systems require specialist servicing. Electrical testing in patient areas needs to be planned around clinical operations. Legionella management in healthcare settings follows more stringent requirements than the baseline ACOP L8 guidance, HTM 04-01 in England, or the equivalent Scottish Health Technical Memoranda guidance in Scotland, alongside similar estates guidance in Wales and Northern Ireland. Fire safety in buildings where occupants have limited mobility requires a more detailed fire risk assessment and more robust evacuation planning than standard commercial buildings.

The DPS provides a procurement route for all of these services. For smaller charities without procurement expertise, the DPS removes the need to find and evaluate compliance contractors independently. Inprova’s team manages the competitive process, carries out due diligence on the winning bidder, and provides post-award support. For charities where trustee governance requires evidence that compliance is being managed through a compliant procurement process, the DPS provides that assurance.

Different compliance categories have different statutory testing frequencies, and managing them across a portfolio of buildings requires systematic planning. The main frequencies are: gas safety checks annually for every gas appliance, electrical periodic inspection (EICR) at least every five years for commercial buildings (some recommend more frequently for higher-risk environments), fire risk assessment review at least annually or when significant changes occur, legionella risk assessment review at least every two years, LOLER thorough examination of lifts every six months for passenger lifts and annually for goods lifts, and portable appliance testing at intervals determined by risk assessment.

For an organisation managing hundreds of buildings, these overlapping cycles create a continuous programme of testing and servicing that needs to be planned, procured, and tracked. Missing a testing cycle is a compliance failure, and if something goes wrong in a building where testing is overdue, the legal and reputational consequences are severe.

The DPS supports a structured approach by providing a single compliant procurement route for all 17 compliance categories. Rather than managing separate procurement processes for each category, you can run competitions through the DPS as each testing cycle approaches. Inprova’s Quantum platform can support the tracking of compliance obligations, contract renewal dates, and testing schedules, providing the single view of your compliance programme that prevents obligations from being missed.

Evidencing compliance is as important as achieving it. Auditors, regulators, elected members, trust boards, and inspection bodies all expect to see documented evidence that building compliance is being systematically managed: that tests are being carried out on schedule, that certificates are current, that remedial actions identified during testing are being addressed, and that the procurement of compliance services is itself compliant.

The DPS supports this evidence chain at every level. The procurement process is documented and compliant, providing an audit trail from requirement identification through to contract award. Due diligence checks on contractors are recorded. Post-award contract management provides performance evidence. And the test certificates, inspection reports, and remediation records that contractors produce form the property-level compliance file.

For organisations using Quantum alongside the DPS, compliance obligations, contract documents, renewal dates, and performance data sit in a single platform. This means when an auditor asks for evidence of your electrical testing programme, or a regulator wants to see your legionella risk assessment schedule, the information is accessible and auditable rather than scattered across individual contractor files and spreadsheets. For organisations where compliance failure carries regulatory consequences, such as healthcare providers subject to CQC inspection or education providers subject to Ofsted, having this governance infrastructure in place is a practical necessity rather than an administrative luxury.

Japanese knotweed is one of the most problematic invasive plant species in the UK. It can grow through concrete and tarmac, damage building foundations, block drainage, and undermine retaining structures. Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, it is an offence to cause Japanese knotweed to grow in the wild, which effectively means that allowing it to spread from your land to neighbouring property is a criminal offence.

For organisations managing property portfolios, Japanese knotweed creates practical and financial problems beyond the structural damage. Mortgage lenders will typically decline or restrict lending on properties with knotweed within seven metres of the building, which affects disposals and right-to-buy sales. Insurance policies may exclude knotweed damage. And litigation from neighbouring landowners whose property is affected by knotweed spreading from your land is an established and growing area of liability.

Treatment programmes typically involve specialist herbicide application over a period of three to five years, with ongoing monitoring to confirm eradication. The DPS covers surveying, treatment, and removal of Japanese knotweed and other invasive plant species through Category 16. For organisations that have identified knotweed on their land, or that need to survey their estate to establish whether knotweed is present, the DPS provides the procurement route for specialist invasive species contractors who can deliver the multi-year treatment programmes that eradication requires.

Compliance testing sometimes identifies conditions that require urgent action. A gas safety check reveals a dangerous boiler that must be immediately disconnected. An electrical inspection identifies a Category 1 (danger present) deficiency that requires immediate remediation. A fire risk assessment finds a critical compartmentation breach in a building with sleeping occupants. In these situations, the remediation cannot wait for a standard procurement timeline.

The DPS can support urgent remediation through an accelerated competition process. Where the specification is clear and the scope of works is defined by the testing report, a competition can be run quickly with a shortened response period. Inprova’s team can mobilise the procurement process within days, and the 10 to 15 day award timeline applies to the standard process, with shorter timescales achievable where the urgency is genuine and the specification is straightforward.

For genuinely immediate safety interventions, such as isolating a dangerous gas appliance or making an electrical installation safe, most organisations use their existing responsive repairs or emergency works contractors. The DPS is then used for the planned follow-on work: replacing the condemned boiler, carrying out the full remediation of the electrical deficiency, or delivering the compartmentation works identified in the fire risk assessment. Inprova’s team can advise on the boundary between emergency response (which should use your existing provisions) and planned remediation (which the DPS is designed for).

Yes. Courts and prisons present some of the most complex compliance environments in the public sector. Prison buildings are occupied 24 hours a day by people who cannot leave, which means every compliance failure has direct safety implications for prisoners, staff, and visitors. Courts are public buildings with high footfall, security requirements, and the need to maintain operations throughout the working day.

The compliance requirements in these buildings are extensive: electrical testing of aged and often complex wiring systems, heating servicing across large institutional boiler plant, fire risk assessments that account for the specific evacuation challenges of secure environments, legionella management of water systems in buildings with multiple wings and complex pipework, asbestos management in buildings many of which were constructed in the 1960s and 1970s, and lift servicing for prisoner, staff, and public lifts with different access and security requirements.

The DPS covers all of these categories, and because each procurement is a further competition, the specification can be tailored to the specific security, access, and operational requirements of each building. Contractors bidding for court or prison compliance work can be evaluated on their experience in secure environments, their approach to managing work in occupied institutional buildings, and their ability to coordinate with facility management teams around operational schedules. Inprova’s post-award due diligence and contractor vetting provides an additional layer of assurance for organisations managing secure and sensitive premises.