Lift consultants for housing improvements

Who are we?

Cundall is a global, multi-disciplinary consultancy delivering sustainable engineering and design solutions across the built environment. We operate across 28 locations with over 1200 consulting engineers and designers who are empowered to act with flexibility and agility in response to the local market conditions and practices. The quality of our people is one of our biggest strengths. Our technical experts have ample experience working in diverse sectors like science and technology, higher education, industrial, residential and many more.


Our vertical transportation services

Our team is a one-stop shop for all your vertical transport consultation and design needs. Cundall offers expert advice on all aspects of managing lifts, from the changes to the UK phone network to DDA compliance and every subject in-between.

- Specification works for new or modernised lifts (to include all building enabling works and traffic calculations) through to procurement, review of tender submissions and site project management.

- Improving and advising on the firefighting and evacuation capabilities of your lift portfolio.

- Auditing of the lift maintenance provisions, auditing LOLER reports, management of your lift contractors, compliance support, safety, and quality assurance of all associated lift works.

- Project management including CDM 2015 Principal Designer duties, including support with the Building Safety Act 2022.

- Improving and advising on sustainability for your lift portfolio.

- Assistance with ad hoc advice, surveys, contract negotiation and value engineering, bespoke specifications for maintenance or refurbishment, accident investigation and poor reliability analysis.

We are all about saving you time, money, and stress. We provide clear and easy to understand expert advice, formulating impartial and independent solutions that are tailored to you as a valued partner, managing your lifts so you do not have to. In many cases, our fees are covered by cost savings made within the work we complete. Fundamentally, we will ensure the safety and wellbeing of your residents will be our priority. Our team has extensive experience working with social and public housing clients.

Get in touch to discuss your vertical transportation requirements.

Wigan Project

Cundall VT were contracted in 2021 to survey, assess, and specify the replacement of 14 vandal resistant lifts in 7 different high-rise blocks, removing the existing 1960s ‘skip stop’ configuration to provide lift service to all floors.

Within our scope we provided full VT, CDM, structural and quantity surveying support, wrote and specified the tender and monitored the project until practical completion in late 2023. Cundall VT assisted with evaluations of the submissions/ tender interviews through to contract award and are currently monitoring defects throughout 2024. All lift replacements were delivered on time and within the budget of £3.5m.

The project was led by our VT team, co-ordinating other Cundall in-house services including electrical, structural, and mechanical engineering. The project was managed through regular meetings with various parties (client, contractor etc) through tracking of actions and deliverables within a shared project plan. Additional specialist resources were engaged for scanning of existing building structure due to a lack of original ‘as-built’ information. The project also involved detailed discussion with the Fire Service about evacuation use in the event of a fire.

“Each building has two lifts, and the old lifts only stopped on either odd or even floors. These are now replaced with lifts that will stop on every floor, making life easier for the residents. This investment in lifts will make a real difference, and it has been great to hear one tenant describe the new lifts as ‘beltin’. It was also mentioned at the Housing Advisory Panel what an improvement the new lifts are for the building, they are quicker, quieter, look good and stop at every floor. Thanks to all involved.”

^{Councillor Susan Gambles, Portfolio Holder for Housing, Wigan Council}

London Borough of Hackney

Cundall were engaged to assist the London Borough of Hackney (LBH) develop a new lift maintenance contract, covering in excess of 600 lifts of various types, maintained by utilising two lift contractors. Part of our involvement was an audit programme to identify the worst performing lifts and to produce a technical specification to form the basis to either replace or refurbish the assets.

After initial meetings, we identified the main areas of work and set up our team to produce all of the different pieces of work. An exercise was undertaken, utilising information received from LBH to identify 60 of the worst performing lifts. While one consultant produced the maintenance specification documents, two other consultants completed the lift surveys of the 60 lifts from which 39 were identified as requiring immediate works. The surveying consultants then produced the detailed technical specifications for the lifts.

We also offer CDM Principal Designer (PD) services, and therefore with our wider mechanical and engineering consultancy base, even complex replacement or refurbishment lift projects could be handled fully in-house from inception to completion.