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HSE ACOP L8 requires every organisation with a water system presenting a Legionella risk to appoint a named individual with day-to-day managerial responsibility for the Legionella control scheme -- commonly referred to as the responsible person. In a care home this is usually the registered manager, the maintenance or facilities manager, or in larger groups a dedicated compliance lead, but it must be a specific named individual, not a job title, a department or an external contractor by default.
The responsible person does not need to personally carry out every temperature check, but they must understand the water system, ensure the water risk assessment is current, ensure the control scheme is being followed on a day-to-day basis, and be able to explain the site's arrangements to an inspector without referring everything to a third party. Where an external water hygiene contractor carries out testing, the responsible person remains accountable for ensuring that work happens and that results are reviewed and acted upon.
When an HSE inspector asks who the responsible person is, an answer that points to "the management team" or "our contractor" is treated as a compliance gap in itself, because the ACOP is explicit that the appointment must be a named individual with documented accountability. This is true even where the underlying temperature monitoring, flushing and remedial work are all being carried out correctly -- the governance structure is assessed separately from the technical control measures.
The appointment should be documented in writing, ideally as a formal letter of appointment or a clause within the water risk assessment itself, stating the individual's name, role, scope of responsibility and the date of appointment. This document, along with evidence of the person's training and competence, should be readily available and produced on request rather than located only after some searching.
A single point of failure is a common weakness: if the named responsible person leaves, goes on long-term leave, or is simply unavailable on the day of an inspection, the site needs a documented deputy arrangement so responsibility does not lapse. Reviewing and, where necessary, re-confirming the appointment at each water risk assessment review is good practice and demonstrates the arrangement is being actively maintained rather than left unchanged for years.
CareHomeDesk gives you compliance checklists, maintenance logs, and contractor management tools built around exactly this kind of knowledge.