In short
Your difficulty is not any single site, it is writing one specification that is defensible across depots, leisure centres, schools, sheltered housing and offices at once. A specification tight enough to be meaningful and loose enough to work everywhere — and it has to survive a procurement process.
You are several sectors at once
A council estate usually contains most of the situations covered separately elsewhere on this site:
- Depots and grounds maintenance. The largest concentration of tool batteries anywhere in the organisation — cordless mowers, strimmers, blowers, hedge cutters — charged in volume, often overnight, often in a workshop with fuel and combustible stores. Usually the highest exposure and the least examined.
- Fleet and e-mobility. Electric vans, cargo bikes for parks and enforcement teams, staff e-bikes.
- Sheltered and supported housing. Mobility scooters and sleeping occupants — see NHS and care and housing associations.
- Schools and leisure. Tool batteries, cleaning machinery, public access. See schools and colleges.
- Waste and recycling operations, where damaged cells arrive in the stream. See recycling and waste.
Write the specification around outcomes
The mistake is to specify a product. Specify what has to be true, and let each site meet it:
- Total watt-hours held per location must be recorded, not battery counts. This single requirement surfaces where your real exposure is, and it is usually not where people expect. How to count.
- Charging must not occur on an escape route or in sleeping accommodation. Absolute, no exceptions, everywhere.
- Original manufacturer chargers only. No marketplace replacements. This needs to be a standing procurement instruction, because otherwise a depot will buy one.
- Every site names a quarantine location for damaged and waste packs before it needs one.
- Where containment is specified, the tested performance and the standard must be evidenced in writing — including which direction the fire was applied from. See EN 14470-1 vs VDMA 24994 vs UL 9540A, and note that no UK regulation mandates any of them.
- Detection must report somewhere staffed, or the specification says why it does not.
Do not write “must be VDMA 24994 certified” into a framework without deciding whether you mean it for every site. It is the most relevant specification for cabinets holding loose packs, but on a small office store it will price out reasonable options for no gain. Tie the requirement to the watt-hours held.
Frequently asked questions
Can we mandate one cabinet type across the whole estate?
You can, and it simplifies procurement, but it usually means paying for capability you do not need at small sites while under-providing at the depot. A better pattern is two or three tiers tied to watt-hours held and whether charging happens in place, with the same evidence requirements applied to all of them.
Where do we start if we have forty sites and no data?
With the depots and grounds maintenance stores. That is where the watt-hours are concentrated, where overnight charging is routine, and where a fire takes vehicles and equipment with it. A walk round three of them with a note of what is charging where will tell you more than an estate-wide survey form that comes back half completed.
Is there a statutory requirement we are failing?
There is no battery-specific regulation to fail. The exposure is the general duty: a suitable and sufficient risk assessment, and control so far as is reasonably practicable. Where lithium-ion batteries are held in quantity and the assessment does not name them, that is the gap an inspector or a coroner would find. See UK law on storing lithium-ion batteries at work.