The ring binder in the vestry

Church buildings carry more statutory duties than most of the people looking after them realise. The record matters more than the binder.

Every congregation I've worked with has a version of this story.

The property convener has done the job for twenty years. He knows which boiler needs a kick in January, which fuse goes when the hall is full, and which electrician will come out on a Sunday. Everything he knows is in a ring binder in the vestry cupboard, and a fair bit of it is in his head. Then he steps down, as he's entitled to, and the binder goes to whoever was unwise enough to miss the meeting.

The new convener opens it. There's a gas certificate from two years ago. There's a fire risk assessment that everyone agrees was done, but what's in the binder is the invoice, not the assessment. The last electrical report was emailed to the old convener's son, who set up the church email address, and nobody has the password. Then the insurance renewal arrives asking for the date of the last electrical inspection and whether the lightning conductor has been tested.

None of this is anyone's fault. It's what happens when a building full of legal duties is looked after by volunteers, with contractors who change, and a record that lives in a cupboard.

What a church actually carries

A church and its hall are a workplace and a public building. The duties that follow don't care that the trustees are unpaid. For a Church of Scotland congregation the Kirk Session are the charity trustees and the duty holders, and their own General Trustees' toolkit spells out what that means.

• Fire. The Fire (Scotland) Act 2005 and the 2006 Regulations require a fire safety risk assessment specific to the building, recorded and reviewed. The alarm is tested weekly, emergency lighting monthly, extinguishers serviced annually, and a logbook kept. Since July 2023 the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service no longer turns out automatically to an unconfirmed alarm, so someone from the congregation has to investigate.
• Electrical. The Electricity at Work Regulations 1989. A periodic inspection report, typically every five years for a church, and portable appliances tested.
• Gas. The Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998. The boilers and the hall cooker checked annually by a registered engineer.
• Asbestos. The Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 put a duty to manage on every non-domestic building. Most church halls were built or altered before 2000.
• Water. A legionella risk assessment wherever there's a hot water system, and most halls have one.
• Lightning protection, oil tanks, lifts and play equipment where they exist, each with its own regime.

On top of the law, the Church adds its own: an annual inspection of every occupied building, a weekly one of every unoccupied building, a five-yearly survey instructed by Presbytery, and a Property Register submitted every year. And the insurer's condition, in the toolkit's own words: policies may be invalidated if utility systems are not maintained and certified to be safe.

That is a lot to hold in a ring binder.

Why it matters more now

Three things have changed.

The first is that buildings are moving. By the Church's own estimate more than a third of its churches face closure or sale, perhaps as many as 500. A building with a clean, dated record of its duties sells and transfers better than one with a cupboard. And when a community group takes over a church hall, the duties go with the keys. So should the evidence.

The second is that halls are busier than churches. Playgroups, foodbanks, polling stations, dance classes. Every let is a public occupancy, and the fire risk assessment, the gas certificate and the electrical report are what stand between the trustees and a very difficult conversation.

The third is that the question has changed everywhere, not just in housing or hospitals. Nobody asks any more whether the boiler was serviced. They ask whether you can prove it, today, with a document. An insurer, a surveyor, a buyer, or an inspector after something has gone wrong.

Three things to do this month

1. Write the list. Every duty the building carries, on one page. Not the maintenance jobs, the legal duties. If you can't say what they are, you can't say whether they're met. The free one-page list at the end of this article will do as a start.
2. Name a person for each. Not "the property committee". A name, and the date they next need to do something.
3. Put the evidence where the next convener can find it. Dated, in one place, and not in anyone's personal email. Here is the test: can you produce the last electrical report and gas certificate in five minutes? If not, you've found your first job.

I've spent fifteen years maintaining the heating and control systems in buildings, church buildings among them, and I've watched this binder change hands more times than I can count. It's why we've built SAMTAP's first sector pack for churches: the duties a church and hall carry, the law behind each one, and a place for the evidence that outlives the convener.

The one-page duty list is free. Download it here; we ask for your name and your church so we know who is using it. The church pack itself is from £50 a month, priced for a congregation rather than a company, and we do the onboarding free of charge: you send us the certificates you have, and we load the buildings, the duties and the documents for you.

Fraser Eadie is co-founder of SAMTAP, which holds the statutory compliance record for buildings. The duties above apply in Scotland; England and Wales differ in detail, principally under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, but the question is the same.