A managing agent in Croydon emailed me in March asking for written confirmation that none of my operatives would use a ladder on her block, “since they’ve been illegal for years now”. I rang her instead of replying. Twenty minutes later she understood that the ban she’d been quoting to contractors since roughly 2011 has never existed, that her own lift-and-shift clause said nothing about access method, and that the reason her rear elevation hadn’t been cleaned properly in three years was a locked side gate rather than any point of law. She was decent about it. Plenty aren’t, and the myth costs London property owners real money every year.

So has anyone ever banned window cleaning ladders?

No. Not Parliament, not the Health and Safety Executive, not the European Union in its most enthusiastic phase. The HSE has spent two decades publicly correcting this, and it still circulates in landlord forums and facilities management inductions across the capital as settled fact.

What changed in 2005 was the framing. Before then a ladder was what a window cleaner used. After the Work at Height Regulations came in, a ladder became one option among several that you have to justify choosing.

What the 2005 Regulations demand of you

The Regulations set out a hierarchy, and the hierarchy is where people get confused. First, avoid work at height altogether where it’s reasonably practicable – a telescopic water-fed pole from pavement level, or cleaning the inside face from within the room. Second, if you can’t avoid it, use an existing safe place of work such as a balcony or a proper flat-roof terrace with edge protection. Third, provide access equipment that prevents a fall. Fourth, where the risk of falling remains, minimise the distance and consequences of one.

A leaning ladder sits low in that hierarchy. Low is not banned. The duty is to plan the work, use competent people, and be able to explain why the ladder was the suitable choice for that specific window on that specific day. Duration, incidentally, doesn’t grant you an exemption – a four-minute job on a ladder attracts the same legal obligations as a fortnight on a scaffold, whatever the trade gossip says about the thirty-minute rule.

Why does the ladder ban myth refuse to die?

Because it suits too many people. That’s the uncomfortable part.

Water-fed pole systems arrived in force around the same time as the Regulations, and the commercial story wrote itself. Pure water, no ladders, insurance-friendly, safe by design. Some of the marketing was honest. A fair amount of it implied a legal prohibition that the seller knew perfectly well didn’t exist, and fifteen years of that message has bedded in.

Who finds the confusion convenient

Large contractors like it because it removes a category of work that’s awkward to supervise and awkward to price. Small operators like it in reverse – they carry the ladder, quote the job, and never write a risk assessment, on the basis that anyone who challenges them is quoting a rule that doesn’t exist anyway. Both positions are lazy. The Regulations don’t ask you to pick a side in the pole-versus-ladder argument, they ask you to think about the elevation in front of you and record what you concluded.

Insurers muddy it further. Mine doesn’t prohibit ladder work; it prices it, asks about heights, and asks whether anyone works above the second storey from a leaning ladder. That’s an underwriting position rather than a legal one, and the two get conflated constantly in tender documents. I’ve read a Greater London Authority-adjacent framework specification that referred to “the statutory ladder prohibition”. Nobody had checked. For my money, that single phrase has done more damage to sensible access planning in the capital than any accident statistic.

Which London jobs still call for a ladder?

More than the industry admits. A pole is a superb piece of kit and it handles the overwhelming majority of what I do – terraces, semis, low-rise blocks, shopfronts with clear standing room. It has limits, and London architecture finds them faster than most.

Deep rear lightwells are the obvious one. There’s a run of converted Victorian houses off Lauriston Road in E9 where the basement flat windows sit at the bottom of a well about 2.4 metres down and 900mm wide, with a cast iron grille overhead. No pole geometry reaches that. You either go down a short ladder or the glass stays dirty, and the leaseholders down there pay the same service charge as everyone above them.

Then there are rear returns behind buildings with no vehicle access. A pole system needs water, and water is heavy. On the tighter stretches of Slades Hill in Enfield, where the van can’t get past the front elevation and the hose run would cross two neighbouring gardens, hauling a 25-litre backpack system and a 9-metre pole through a side passage is not obviously safer than a properly footed ladder against a solid brick wall for two first-floor sashes. Someone has decided otherwise on paper, in an office, without ever seeing the passage.

Conservatory surrounds, too. The pole angle over a glazed roof is often impossible without dragging brush and dirty water back across the panels you’ve cleaned, and the alternative, standing on the conservatory frame, is dangerous in a way the risk assessment can’t soften.

One more category, and it’s the one that gets argued about most: bay windows on the 1930s stock out towards Pettits Lane in Romford. The pole reaches the glass fine. What it struggles with is the underside of the bay roof and the tight junction where the upper sash meets the render, because the brush head wants an angle the pole geometry won’t give you from the front garden. Half the operatives I’ve worked with will tell you that corner has never been properly cleaned by a pole on those houses, and they’re right. Three minutes on a ladder settles it, if the path underneath is sound.

Often the path isn’t sound.

The assessment I run through on site

Ground condition first, because it’s the thing that kills people. Flat, firm, not paving that rocks when you step on it, not a manhole cover, not the sloping front garden path you get on the Edwardian stock around Eastcote Road in Ruislip. Then the top bearing point – solid wall or a stand-off, never a plastic gutter, never a fragile cill. Then the angle, roughly four up to one out, which most operatives eyeball wrong when they’re tired at four o’clock on a Friday. Then the reach: if I need to move my hips outside the stiles to get the far corner of the pane, the ladder moves instead. Then duration and load, which is where a lot of theoretically legal ladder work becomes indefensible – detailing frames, scraping paint splash, anything two-handed.

If any of those come back wrong, the answer is a pole, a MEWP, or a conversation with the client about what can’t be cleaned. Sometimes it’s the third one, and telling a customer their rear elevation is unreachable at the price they want to pay is a better day’s work than pretending otherwise.

What happens after a fall in Barking?

The investigation goes looking for documents, and it goes looking for them immediately. I had a subcontractor’s operative come off a stile-damaged ladder at a shop with flats above on Longbridge Road, IG11, some years back – not my job, but I knew the firm, and I watched the aftermath closely enough to change how I run mine.

The paperwork that decides whether you’re prosecuted

Nobody asked whether ladders were permitted. They asked for the pre-use inspection record, the detailed ladder inspection log, evidence of training, the site-specific method statement, and the reasoning behind selecting a ladder over the alternatives. The firm had a generic risk assessment covering “window cleaning” with no reference to that address, no inspection log at all, and a ladder with a bent stile that had been in service for at least eight months. That’s what gets you an improvement notice or worse. The access method was never the offence.

Keep the records and the ladder becomes a defensible tool. Skip them and the ladder becomes exhibit A – along with your quotation, your invoice, and whatever you told the client about how the job would be done.

Where do I draw my own line on ladder work?

First-floor domestic and shopfront work, yes, subject to the on-site checks. Above that, no, and I’ll lose the job rather than argue it. Second-storey ladder work on London housing stock means an extension ladder at full stretch against a cill line that’s frequently rendered, frequently soft, and frequently hiding a cable run. Legal, arguably. Sensible, no.

The footing myth, which needs to die faster than the ban myth

Someone standing on the bottom rung is the weakest form of stability there is, and it’s still treated as the default answer on domestic jobs across the capital. Ground stakes, a proper stability device, tying off at the top – those work. A colleague holding the stile while checking his phone stops nothing. I’ve turned down two-man ladder arrangements on properties around Woodcote Road in Wallington where the client specifically offered a second body as the safety measure, and for my money that offer tells you more about the state of the trade’s understanding than any HSE statistic does.

The Regulations have been in force for twenty-one years now. They ask a straightforward question of anyone putting a ladder against a London window – why this, here, today? A firm that can answer it in writing is working lawfully. A firm that can’t has been getting away with it, and one wet Tuesday on a mossy path will settle the matter for them.

For my money the ladder isn’t going anywhere. Neither is the myth.