If you provide shopping trolleys or cash and carry trolleys for your customers to use in your store, shop, or cash and carry. You fall under the same legal duties that you would by providing this equipment to your staff. You must ensure that it is in a serviceable state of repair.
But where are the guidelines for this equipment, where do I find out what is fit for purpose and what's not, how do I know that I have covered myself when it comes to not being sued.
Well to be frank there are no guidelines, its simply a case of ensuring via common sense and using legislations such as LOLER and PUWER , to to ascertain whether your equipment is safe or, when the risks are so large to small businesses, is this really fair?
I would agree with you that it's not. So when you have no guidance you have to ensure that you bases are covered just that little bit more, you need to make sure that you have every thing in place so that if it does hit the fan, you truly can with hand on heart say that you have carried out all the necessary paperwork to prove that you have paid attention to the issues.
There are some really simple basic you can carry out to ensure that you cover your self. Check these pieces of equipment "daily", I know your thinking that you don't have time to do it, but its imperative. You nor your staff use these trolleys, if you did you could have a reporting structure in place to assist in the identification of damages. But as these are for customer use, there is less chance that the customer will let you know that the trolley is dangerous they will just leave it where they found it. Use a daily check sheet , so that it's recorded. This will ensure that if there are any damages they are identified, and records for repair. Make sure that if there are any damages to the equipment that the damaged units are segregated from the good conditioned equipment, preferably ensure that they are chained up so that customer can't just come and take a damaged unit.
Put a risk assessments in to place that will certainly highlight ares of concern, and points that you must pay attention to. There are also additional pieces of paperwork that you can put in place to show that you are trying to identify risk, try thing like near miss reportsthese will show if somebody nearly had an accident, and identifies procedures and reporting structures to reduce the chances of the accident in the future.
Most important note for you, is to keep these records up to date there is no point in putting it all in place and then not looking at it all for another 12 months the HSE will take a very dim view if you have all of these things, but haven't kept it all up to date.
Remember your obligation is to reduce risk to a practicable minimum not eliminate the risk.
Good Luck and remember to stay safe.
