Ask an estates manager where their maintenance history lives and the honest answer is usually: with whoever has the maintenance contract. The asset list is in the contractor’s system. The service sheets are PDFs in their portal. The test readings are wherever their engineers’ app puts them. It has been this way for so long that it feels like the natural order.
Regulation is now moving against that arrangement — decisively.
Duties are attaching to the building, not the contract
The Building Safety Act’s “golden thread” is the clearest statement of the new principle: an accurate, accessible record of a building’s safety information, maintained by the dutyholder, that must survive changes of dutyholder. It applies formally to higher-risk buildings, but the direction of travel is unmistakable and spreading — record duties that sit with the owner or operator, enforceable against them, regardless of who does the wrench-turning.
F-Gas regulation has quietly worked this way for years: leak-check records must be kept by the operator of the equipment as well as the contractor. Fire safety reforms, electrical safety standards, and the EU’s emerging renovation-passport regime all point the same way. The regulator does not ask your contractor for the building’s records. It asks you.
The contractor-switch test
Here is a simple audit you can run this week. Imagine your main maintenance contract ends in ninety days — acrimoniously. What do you actually hold?
- A complete asset list with serial numbers, locations and install dates?
- Service history per asset — worksheets, photos, test readings — or just invoices?
- Certificates, with expiry dates, in one place?
- F-Gas records per system, going back the statutory five years?
Most estates fail this test not because their contractor is hostile, but because the data was never theirs to begin with. Exports arrive — eventually — as spreadsheets and PDF dumps, stripped of structure, missing photos, disconnected from the assets they describe. The next contractor starts from an asset survey, at your expense, and year one of their tenure is spent rebuilding what you already paid to create.
Owner-held records: the structural fix
The fix is not a better export at the end of the contract. It is changing where the record lives during it. In an owner-held model, the asset register and its history are anchored to your buildings, in your account. Contractors are granted access while they work for you: their completed worksheets, photos and readings land directly in your record. When the relationship ends, their access ends — and the history stays.
Under this arrangement the golden-thread question — “can your records survive a change of dutyholder or contractor?” — stops being a project and becomes a property of the architecture. Onboarding the next firm starts from a complete record. Audits become exports. And the survey you would have commissioned pays for the system instead.
Where FaciliTasker fits
FaciliTasker is built on exactly this principle. Every asset carries its own history — service visits, worksheets, photos, test readings, certificates with expiry tracking — held in the building owner’s account and retained when contractors change. To see what it looks like with one of your own sites, book a 30-minute demo.
This article is general information, not legal advice. The golden thread’s formal scope and timescales depend on building classification — check the current position for your portfolio.
