A university lift can have a harder working life than its location might suggest.
Teaching buildings can go from relatively quiet to heavily occupied within minutes as lectures change. Libraries and study spaces may remain open late into the evening. Laboratories, offices, student accommodation and specialist facilities create very different patterns of use, often across the same estate.
Then there is the age of the buildings themselves.
Many university campuses have developed over decades rather than being designed as a single development. Historic buildings sit alongside post-war teaching blocks and much newer facilities. The lifts serving them can be just as varied.
UCL has provided a useful example of the scale of the problem. During 2026, the university began a three-year, £17 million programme to modernise 48 lifts after carrying out a condition assessment of all 260 lifts across its estate.
That is significant not simply because of the amount being spent. It shows how lift reliability is increasingly being treated as an estate-management issue rather than a series of unrelated breakdowns.
One Campus Can Contain Generations of Lift Equipment
Managing lifts across a large university estate is very different from looking after one installation in a single commercial building.
Some lifts may have been installed recently. Others may have been modernised at different points during their working lives. A third group may still contain older control and drive equipment that is becoming more difficult to support.
The buildings themselves can impose equally different demands.
A lift serving student accommodation may operate throughout the day and night. A teaching building experiences sharp changes in demand around timetabled sessions. Laboratory buildings may need to accommodate equipment as well as passengers, while other lifts form an essential part of an accessible route through the campus.
This makes age alone a poor way of deciding where investment should go.
An older lift that has been well maintained and remains dependable may be less of an immediate concern than a newer installation suffering repeated faults.
The useful information comes from condition, reliability and how important that particular lift is to the operation of the building.
A Breakdown Can Remove Access to More Than One Floor
When a lift stops working, the effect depends heavily on where it is.
In some buildings, people can use another lift nearby. In others, the only alternative is a staircase.
For a student who can comfortably use the stairs, that may mean inconvenience and a longer route. For somebody who relies on step-free access, the same failure can make a lecture theatre, laboratory, library or office inaccessible.
This is particularly important on campuses made up of older buildings where alternative accessible routes are not always available.
Reliable university lifts therefore have a role that goes beyond moving large numbers of people between floors. In some locations, they are what makes that part of the estate usable independently by disabled students, staff and visitors.
That changes how you should view downtime.
A lift can be a relatively small item within the overall university estate while being critical to the people who depend on it.
Breakdown Data Can Show Where the Problems Really Are
One of the more interesting aspects of UCL’s current programme is how it selected the first lifts.
Rather than approaching every installation the same way, the university assessed its lift estate. They identified reliability issues and outdated systems and prioritised the first 48 lifts for replacement or major upgrade.
The university is also using engineering reports, maintenance information and feedback from people using its buildings to inform future decisions.
That is a much more useful approach than waiting for each lift to fail badly enough to force action.
Maintenance records can reveal patterns that are easy to miss when you consider faults individually. Repeated door problems, intermittent control faults or increasing call-outs may each appear manageable at first. Over time, they can indicate that an installation is becoming increasingly difficult to keep reliable.
Downtime matters too.
A lift that fails four times but is returned to service within an hour each time creates a different operational problem from one that remains unavailable for several days while a component is sourced.
Looking at those patterns across an estate lets you direct investment to the installations creating the greatest operational risk.
Obsolescence Does Not Always Announce Itself with a Breakdown
A lift does not have to be permanently unreliable before its age becomes a concern.
Parts availability can gradually become a problem as equipment manufacturers discontinue older systems. Electronic components, drives, and controllers can be particularly relevant because replacement parts may become scarce long before the mechanical installation itself reaches the end of its useful life.
At first, that might simply mean waiting longer for a component.
Later, it can mean relying on refurbished equipment or increasingly limited stocks. Eventually, maintaining the original system may cease to be practical.
This is where planned lift modernisation can be considerably easier to manage than waiting for a major failure.
Controls, drive systems, door equipment and other elements can potentially be upgraded while suitable parts of the existing installation remain in service. The exact scope depends on the condition and design of the individual lift.
For a university, being able to plan that work matters.
A scheduled modernisation can be coordinated with quieter periods, building works or academic timetables. An unexpected failure gives an estates team considerably fewer choices.
Universities Cannot Simply Close Every Building While Work Takes Place
Replacing or substantially modernising a lift inevitably creates some disruption.
On a university campus, deciding when that disruption occurs can be almost as important as deciding what work needs to be done.
Teaching continues for much of the year. Research facilities may operate continuously. Student accommodation cannot simply be emptied whenever engineering work is required. Some buildings may also contain only one lift providing step-free access between floors.
Summer periods can provide opportunities for larger projects in teaching buildings, but even then campuses do not become empty.
Research, conferences, postgraduate activity, maintenance work and summer programmes continue. Residential buildings present different constraints again.
This makes sequencing important.
Where several lifts serve the same building, work may be phased so that some vertical access remains available. Where there is only one lift, temporary arrangements and communication with building users become much more significant.
A technically successful project can still cause considerable difficulty if you haven’t considered the operational consequences beforehand.
New Passenger Lifts Are Not Always the Answer
An ageing lift does not automatically need to be removed and replaced.
That distinction matters on older university estates.
Existing shafts, machine spaces and structural arrangements may still be suitable. If major elements remain in good condition, modernising selected equipment can sometimes extend the installation’s useful life without the extent of building work associated with a full replacement.
In other situations, replacement may make more sense.
The existing lift may no longer provide adequate capacity. Its dimensions may restrict accessibility. Several major systems may be approaching the end of their practical working life at the same time. The building itself may also be undergoing substantial refurbishment that changes what is required from the lift.
Where new or replacement passenger lifts are being considered, specification should therefore start with the building’s present and future use rather than simply reproducing what was installed previously.
A lift specified for a university building thirty years ago was designed around the requirements known at that time. Those requirements may no longer reflect how the building operates today.
Accessibility Has to Be Considered Across the Journey
Improving lift reliability does not automatically make a campus accessible.
The route to the lift matters just as much.
A modernised lift offers limited benefit if a wheelchair user encounters steps before reaching it, cannot comfortably manoeuvre through the entrance, or arrives on a floor where the onward route is inaccessible.
This is particularly relevant on estates that have evolved through numerous extensions and alterations.
Changes in floor level, heavy doors, narrow circulation routes and indirect connections between buildings can all affect whether a theoretically accessible route works in practice.
Lift projects therefore make more sense when considered alongside the wider movement of people through the building.
UCL’s current programme reflects that broader approach. Its lift work sits within an infrastructure plan that also considers accessibility and other building improvements rather than treating vertical transport as an isolated engineering system.
For other large estates, the principle is useful even if the scale is very different.
Maintenance Strategy Matters as Much as Capital Investment
Spending money on ageing equipment addresses only part of the problem.
Once modernisation work is complete, the lifts still need effective maintenance.
Universities with dozens or hundreds of installations need accurate information about faults, response times, recurring problems and equipment condition. Without it, they risk returning to a reactive cycle where investment decisions are driven by whichever lift has failed most recently.
UCL has combined its modernisation programme with changes to its maintenance arrangements and introduced remote monitoring on an initial group of lifts.
The technology itself is less important than what the information allows an estates team to do.
A pattern of intermittent faults can be identified. Performance can be compared before and after work. Teams can investigate repeated problems rather than continually reset them. Evidence can support investment decisions instead of anecdote.
For an estate containing lifts of different ages, manufacturers and types, that information becomes increasingly valuable.
The Real Question Is Which Lifts Need Attention First
Few universities will be in a position to replace or modernise every ageing lift at once.
They should not necessarily need to.
The more useful approach is to understand the estate well enough to distinguish between a lift that is old and a lift that is becoming a problem.
Condition assessments, maintenance records, component availability, breakdown frequency and downtime all contribute to that picture. So does the lift’s role within the building.
A lift that provides the only practical step-free route to several teaching floors may warrant a different priority from an installation with another suitable lift immediately alongside it.
That is what makes university lift management an estate-planning issue rather than simply a maintenance problem.
The £17 million being invested at UCL attracts attention because of its scale. The more interesting part is the work done before the figure was announced: assessing 260 individual lifts, identifying where reliability and outdated equipment were causing problems, and deciding which installations to address first.
For any university with an ageing estate, that is probably the more useful place to start.
