F-Gas Across a Multi-Site Estate: Who Is Legally the Operator?

The most uncomfortable meeting I have sat in on this subject lasted about ten minutes. A retail group, an estates manager, and a simple question from an auditor: for the twenty-three sites you lease, who is the F-Gas operator? The estates manager said the landlord handled plant. The landlord's managing agent had, it turned out, assumed the tenant handled anything serving the tenant's demise. Between them they had a complete set of assumptions and an incomplete set of records.

Nobody had been negligent. The rule is genuinely easy to misread, and on a mixed estate of freeholds, leases and licences it is easy for every party to believe somebody else is holding it. If you run refrigeration across more than a handful of sites, this is worth an hour of your time. Our general guide to the UK F-Gas rules covers the obligations themselves. This one is about who they land on.

The definition, and what it actually turns on

Article 2 of Regulation (EU) No 517/2014, retained in UK law, defines it in a single line. An operator is "the natural or legal person exercising actual power over the technical functioning of products and equipment covered by this Regulation".

Read that again, because two words do all the work. Not ownership. Not occupation. Actual power over the technical functioning. The test is about control, and specifically about who can decide that a system gets modified, gets repaired, or gets its refrigerant charge changed. That includes the financial power to make those decisions, because someone who can only request a repair is not the person deciding whether it happens.

The consequence catches people out. You can own a building and not be the operator of the plant inside it. You can occupy a unit under a lease and be the operator of equipment you do not own. The paperwork on the asset does not settle the question. The reality of who controls it does.

Working it out across a mixed estate

Most groups have three or four occupancy types running at once. Here is how the question usually resolves, with the caveat that the lease terms matter and this is not legal advice.

Situation	Who is usually the operator	What decides it
Freehold, owner-occupied	The occupying business	Straightforward, you control everything
Leased unit, plant serving only your demise	Usually the tenant	Who instructs and pays for maintenance and repair
Leased unit, landlord-maintained base building plant	Usually the landlord or their agent	Who holds the maintenance contract and decides on works
Shopping centre or multi-let, shared plant	Landlord or managing agent	Control sits with whoever runs the central system
Concession inside a host store	Depends entirely on the agreement	Read it. This is where the gaps live
Equipment on loan from a supplier	Often the site, not the supplier	Who calls the engineer when it fails

That last row surprises people regularly. Branded chillers and freezers placed by a drinks or ice cream supplier are frequently on the site's maintenance arrangement in practice, whatever the placement agreement says about ownership. If your business rings the engineer, your business is probably exercising actual power over its technical functioning.

The practical move is simple. Build a column into your asset register called "operator", fill it in per site with a note of why, and where the answer is genuinely unclear, write to the other party and agree it. An agreed position on file is worth a great deal more than a shared assumption.

Outsourcing does not transfer the duty

This is the point I would most want an estates team to take away. Appointing a contractor to do your leak checks is entirely sensible and it does not move the obligation. The duty in Article 4 falls on operators, who "shall ensure that the equipment is checked for leaks". Ensuring is an active verb. It means knowing the checks happened at the right interval, not assuming they did because there is a contract in place.

A missed leak check is a compliance failure whether or not there was ever a leak. If your contractor did not attend, that is a contractual problem between you and them, and a regulatory problem between you and the regulator.

The frequencies, and the calculation everybody skips

Article 4 sets the intervals by charge in tonnes of CO₂ equivalent:

Charge	Minimum frequency	With automatic leak detection
5 to under 50 tonnes CO₂e	At least every 12 months	At least every 24 months
50 to under 500 tonnes CO₂e	At least every 6 months	At least every 12 months
500 tonnes CO₂e or more	At least every 3 months	At least every 6 months

CO₂e is the refrigerant charge multiplied by that refrigerant's global warming potential. It is not the weight of gas, and this is where estates get their frequencies wrong. Two systems holding the same kilograms can sit in different bands entirely, depending on what is in them.

So the compliance question is not "when did we last service it". It is "what is in it, how much, and therefore how often". If nobody in your organisation can produce refrigerant type and charge for your largest systems, your leak check schedule is a guess. That is the single most common gap I see, and it is fixable with a survey.

It also has a direct bearing on estate planning, because high-GWP refrigerants push systems into tighter check bands and are subject to the quota phase-down. Our pieces on the R410A phase-out and on CO₂ transcritical systems cover where that pressure is heading.

What your records have to contain

Article 6 is specific, and it is worth checking your records against it line by line rather than trusting that a contractor's portal covers it. Operators of equipment requiring leak checks must establish and maintain records for each piece of equipment specifying:

• The quantity and type of fluorinated greenhouse gases installed
• The quantities added during installation, maintenance or servicing, or due to leakage
• Whether gases were recycled or reclaimed, including the facility details
• The quantity of fluorinated greenhouse gases recovered
• The identity of the undertaking that installed, serviced, maintained or repaired the equipment
• The dates and results of the checks carried out
• Measures taken where equipment was decommissioned

Records must be kept for at least five years and "shall be made available, on request, to the appropriate regulator".

Read that list against what you actually hold. Most estates have dates and engineer names. Fewer have quantities added and recovered per asset. Almost none have the decommissioning line filled in, which matters because equipment does get scrapped and the record of what happened to its refrigerant is part of the obligation.

The five-year problem nobody plans for

Records live for five years. Contractors do not always. When you change refrigeration supplier, the historical records for your assets need to come with you, and the time to agree that is when you sign, not when you leave.

Two things to put in every contract:

• An export right. You can extract your full F-Gas record set, in a usable format, at any time and without charge. If it lives in the contractor's portal and you cannot get it out, it is not really your record.
• A handover obligation at termination. Complete records transferred within a defined period, whatever the reason for the change.

I have seen a group lose four years of leak check history in a supplier change. Nothing bad had happened. They simply could not prove that nothing bad had happened, which for five years is the same problem.

Who is allowed to do the work

Article 10 requires certification for individual engineers and for the undertakings employing them. It also includes a line that matters on a multi-site estate: any undertaking assigning this work to another undertaking "shall take reasonable steps to ascertain that the latter holds the necessary certificates for the required tasks".

If you buy refrigeration through a national FM provider who subcontracts regionally, that clause is running down the chain. It is entirely reasonable to ask your provider who actually attends each region and to see evidence that those firms are certified. Companies as well as engineers.

An audit-readiness check you can run this week

Pick three sites at random and try to produce the following within an hour. Not eventually. Within an hour.

1. A list of every F-Gas system on that site, with refrigerant type and charge.
2. The CO₂e figure for each, and therefore the required check frequency.
3. The date of the last leak check on each, and the result.
4. The name and certification of the undertaking that carried it out.
5. Any refrigerant added or recovered in the last twelve months, by quantity.
6. Confirmation of who the operator is for that site, and why.

If you can do that for three random sites, you are in good shape and the rest is administration. If you cannot, you now know exactly where the gap is, which is a considerably better position than finding out when the regulator's guidance is being read back to you.

Where to start if this is a mess

It usually is a bit of a mess, and it is recoverable. Survey the estate and capture refrigerant type and charge for every system. Calculate CO₂e and set the correct frequency per asset. Fill the operator column in and resolve the ambiguous ones in writing. Consolidate whatever historical records exist into somewhere you control. Then align the leak check schedule with your planned maintenance visits so an engineer is not making two trips.

That last step is worth real money. If your PPM frequency already meets or exceeds the required check interval, the compliance work rides along with a visit you are paying for anyway. Our guide to planned refrigeration servicing covers how the two schedules fit together.

If you would like the survey done properly, including the CO₂e calculation per asset and a register you can actually use, that is something we do across London and the South East. Ask us for a quote and tell us how many sites you are dealing with.

About the author: Ali Elm runs Be Cool Refrigeration & Air Conditioning, a family-run London firm that has been installing, servicing and repairing commercial refrigeration and air conditioning since 2004. His F-Gas certified team has delivered more than 2,000 projects across London and the South East.

This article explains general regulatory requirements and is not legal advice. Where operator status across a lease is unclear, take advice on your specific agreements.