The Compliance a Managing Agent Carries but Rarely Controls

A commercial managing agent occupies an awkward position in the compliance chain. The agent does not own the building, often does not occupy it, and in many cases has never seen its plant room — yet the moment a management contract places control of the building services in the agent's hands, a set of legal duties transfers with it, and those duties do not soften because the agent is acting for someone else. The plumbing and heating compliance across a managed portfolio is a liability the agent frequently holds and rarely controls, and the gap between holding it and controlling it is where the exposure sits.

The clearest example is Legionella, because it shows exactly how the duty attaches. Under the HSE's Approved Code of Practice L8, someone must be the dutyholder for each building's water systems — the person with overall control and accountability for managing the risk. In a managed building, where the contract gives the agent responsibility for the building services, the agent becomes that dutyholder. What catches agents out is what the role actually involves. The dutyholder can, and usually must, delegate the operational work to a competent contractor — but the legal duty itself cannot be delegated. 

Appointing a water treatment company does not move the responsibility onto them; it remains with the dutyholder, who is then responsible for checking that the contractor is competent, that the work is appropriate, and that the system stays in control. An agent who has appointed a contractor and assumed the problem is therefore handled has misunderstood the arrangement: the agent has delegated the task and kept the liability.

That same pattern repeats across every other plumbing and heating duty in the building, which is what makes it a portfolio problem rather than a single risk. Commercial gas safety sits with whoever controls the appliances and the plant; where that is the agent, the agent needs current commercial gas safety records for every appliance and the evidence that any dangerous findings were closed out. In buildings with vulnerable occupants, the thermostatic mixing valves that prevent scalding are only compliant if they are the right specification and have in-service test records, not merely fitted. The building's backflow protection, and any reduced pressure zone valve on it, carries an annual legal test that lapses quietly. And underneath all of these sits the same principle as Legionella: the duty attaches to control, control usually attaches to the agent by contract, and the operational task can be delegated while the accountability cannot.

The structural problem for an agent is that these duties are inherited, not chosen, and they are inherited at the worst possible moment for knowing about them: the point of taking a building under management. A new management instruction arrives with whatever compliance state the previous arrangement left behind — a Legionella risk assessment that may be current or may be three years stale, gas records that may or may not match the plant on site, an RPZ valve whose last test date nobody has, a TMV regime that exists on paper but not in test logs. The agent takes on the building and, with it, takes on the dutyholder role for a compliance position they have not yet seen. If something has been lapsing, it is now the agent's lapse, dated from the day the contract began, whether or not the agent created it.

This is why the allocation of these duties needs to be explicit in the management agreement and verified at the point of takeover, rather than assumed. The guidance is clear that where a contract is silent or ambiguous about who manages the water systems, the duty defaults to whoever has control of the building — which, for a managing agent, means silence in the contract does not protect the agent, it exposes them. An agreement that spells out exactly which compliance duties the agent is taking on, which remain with the landlord, and which sit with individual tenants in a multi-let, is the difference between a known scope and an open-ended one. And a compliance audit at takeover — establishing the actual state of the Legionella assessment, the gas records, the TMVs, the backflow protection and the plant, before the ink dries — turns an inherited unknown into a documented starting position from which the agent can actually manage.

For commercial managing agents, the honest position is that the plumbing and heating compliance of a managed building is a real and personal liability, held by the agent by virtue of control, and unaffected by the fact that a contractor does the work or a landlord owns the asset. The questions worth asking of every building in a managed portfolio are whether the management agreement actually says who holds each duty, whether the current compliance position was verified at takeover or merely inherited, and whether the operational contractors are competent and their work is being checked rather than assumed. The duty that transfers silently, at the point of taking a building on, is the one that surfaces loudly, at the point something goes wrong.

Pleasant Plumbers' commercial team works with managing agents across London — auditing the plumbing and heating compliance of managed buildings at takeover and on an ongoing basis, covering Legionella, commercial gas, TMVs, backflow and plant condition, so the duties an agent holds are duties an agent can evidence. To review the compliance position across your managed portfolio, call or WhatsApp 0800 046 1000, or email [email protected].

#FacilitiesManagement #PropertyManagement