Is Your Car Park a PCBU Hazard? HSWA 2015 Duties
- PotholeExpert
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
A pothole in your car park is not a tidiness problem. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, it is a hazard in a place where people work and visit. That reframes the whole conversation. The question stops being "does the car park look shabby" and becomes "have I done what is reasonably practicable to control a known risk." The first question has no legal weight. The second one does.
If a staff member, courier, or customer trips on a lifted edge and breaks a wrist, WorkSafe does not ask whether the asphalt was old. It asks what you knew, when you knew it, and what you did about it. This guide sets out who carries that duty and how a simple, dated repair record answers the question before it is asked.
What a PCBU is, and why your car park counts
HSWA 2015 puts the primary duty on the PCBU: the person conducting a business or undertaking. Almost every business is a PCBU. The Act also names a second duty-holder that matters here: the person who manages or controls a workplace. A workplace is any place a worker goes, or is likely to go, while at work. A car park that staff cross to reach the building, that couriers reverse into, and that contractors walk through is squarely a workplace.
So a car park open to customers and staff sits under two overlapping duties. The PCBU must keep workers and others safe so far as is reasonably practicable. The person controlling that car park must ensure it is without risks to health and safety. You can be both at once.
The "reasonably practicable" test, applied to a real defect
"So far as is reasonably practicable" is the phrase the whole Act turns on. It weighs the likelihood of harm and how serious that harm could be against what it would cost in time, money, and effort to remove or reduce the risk.
Run a known 20mm trip lip near the main door through that test. The likelihood of someone catching it is high because everyone walks that line. The potential harm is a fall, a fracture, a head injury. The cost to control it is a fixed-price asphalt repair and a few hours of disruption. The maths is not close. A cheap, known fix against a serious, likely harm means the law expects you to act. Ignoring it is the definition of a failure to do what was reasonably practicable.
Compare that with hairline surface cracking in a far corner no one walks through. Lower likelihood, lower harm, so a longer timeframe is defensible. The test is not "fix everything today." It is "act in proportion to the risk, and be able to show you did."
Who actually carries the duty
This is where managers get caught. The duty does not neatly sit with whoever you assume.
Owner-occupier. You control the workplace and you are the PCBU. The duty is plainly yours.
Landlord and tenant. Both can hold a duty at the same time. HSWA duties cannot be contracted away. A lease clause that says "tenant maintains the car park" allocates cost, not legal responsibility. WorkSafe can still look to the party that controls the area.
Body corporate. Common-property car parks usually fall to the body corp as the controller, with the committee accountable for getting maintenance done.
Facilities contractor. If you manage the site on behalf of an owner, you may be the person who manages or controls that workplace, so part of the duty travels with you.
The practical rule: if you can decide whether the pothole gets fixed, you hold a slice of the duty. Sort out who that is in writing, then make sure someone is inspecting.
What WorkSafe expects you to do
WorkSafe's model for managing risk is consistent: identify, assess, control, and review. For a car-park surface that means four habits.
Identify. Walk the surface on a set schedule. Log defects with a date and a photo.
Assess. Rank each defect by where it is and how big the level change is. A lip on a desire line outranks a bigger crack no one crosses.
Control. Make safe immediately where needed (cone, tape, temporary cold-mix), then book a permanent repair.
Review. Re-inspect after the fix and keep the record.
The thread running through all four is documentation. An undocumented inspection, in a dispute, may as well not have happened.
How a dated photo and a fixed quote prove you acted
This is where the repair process does double duty. Our quoting is built on a dated photo. You photograph the defect, we return a fixed quote within 24 hours, and the job is typically booked within 48 hours. Each of those steps is timestamped, and together they build the exact paper trail "reasonably practicable" demands: here is the defect, here is the date we knew, here is the date we acted.
We saw-cut back to sound asphalt and seal the joints rather than smear a patch over the hole. A patch reopens at its edges the next wet winter and the hazard returns, taking your "we fixed it" defence with it. A clean cut-out reinstated to full depth, with sealed joints, is a permanent repair and a closed item on your hazard register. For public-access car parks we run cones and a spotter, and we can work after-hours so trading is not interrupted. Every job carries a 12-month workmanship warranty and ends with a dated before/after photo report.
That report is a maintenance record and a liability record at once. See our car park repair guide for the full property-manager picture, and our pothole repair page for how the permanent method works.
When a defect crosses from housekeeping to notifiable
Most surface defects are routine risk management. A few are not. Under HSWA, a notifiable event includes a serious injury or a situation that exposed a person to serious risk. If a fall on your car park puts someone in hospital, that can trigger a duty to notify WorkSafe and preserve the site. At that point your inspection log and dated repair records stop being good practice and become the evidence you are judged on.
The cleaner your documentation already is, the better that day goes.
Send a photo of the worst defect in your car park and get a fixed quote within 24 hours. You will have a price, a booking inside 48 hours, and a dated record that shows you acted on a known hazard.
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