In hospitality and leisure the water that makes the guest experience is also the biggest liability on the site, and the duty to control it sits, by law, with a named person.
Legionnaires' disease is no longer an overseas-resort problem. In 2024 most cases in England and Wales were caught in the community rather than abroad, and the disease still killed around one in thirty-five of the people who contracted it. A single spa-pool failure has led to three deaths and a fine of GBP 1 million under health and safety law, and that duty of care cannot be delegated away.
Pools concentrate the problem. There are fewer of them every year, around 1.8% fewer annually across nearly 2,900 UK sites, as rising energy and maintenance cost forces closures. The same pool hall that carries the Legionella and chemical risk is also the single biggest energy and water cost centre on the site.
Most operators meet all of this with separate contracts: one firm for Legionella, another for the pool plant, another for the air, another for energy. No one owns the whole wet environment, so when something fails there are four suppliers and no single answer, which is not a defence an inspector or a court will accept.