Electrical safety doesn’t end with the inspection

Dan Sedgwick, founder of Checker, explains why electrical safety depends not only on carrying out the inspection, but on ensuring the report, remedial evidence and next-test date survive long enough to matter.

On October 28, 2020, housing technician Emmilia Musk and a colleague went to a ground-floor flat at 1 Oaklea in Old Welwyn with a notice. The owner would not accept it, so they posted it through the letterbox. Two days earlier, Musk had recorded exposed wiring in the living room and kitchen and missing spacers at the consumer unit. In a later witness statement, the tenant said she had never been given an Electrical Installation Condition Report during her tenancy.

A satisfactory report for the whole property was eventually produced. But it arrived after the council's seven-day deadline and after the tenant had left. The First-tier Tribunal found several breaches of the electrical safety regulations and confirmed a £5,000 penalty.

The case stayed with me because nobody was arguing that an inspection report had no value. The problem was that the report had not moved with the job. The inspection, the tenant, the council request and the eventual certificate sat in different parts of the story.

That is why I think an electrical inspection is two jobs. The first is to test the installation as it stands. The second is to leave a record that lets the next competent person understand what was found, what changed and when the property must be inspected again. If the second job is weak, the next inspection starts with detective work.

The dates now make that weakness harder to ignore. The original timetable for the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020 applied to new tenancies from July 1, 2020, and to existing tenancies from April 1, 2021. Five years was the maximum interval, not a fixed term for every property. The first five-year anniversaries therefore began arriving in 2025. By April 2026, properties inspected near the existing-tenancy deadline were reaching theirs. The actual date still comes from the latest report, which may require an earlier inspection.

The 2020 Regulations, as amended, describe a chain of evidence rather than a single file. The report must state the result and the date by which the next inspection is required. An existing tenant must receive a copy within 28 days. A council must receive one within seven days of a written request. The landlord must retain the report and give it to the person carrying out the next inspection. Where further investigation or remedial work is required, the work and its written confirmation become part of that chain too.

For contractors, the useful question is not whether every one of those duties belongs to them. It does not. The more useful question is what they control when they hand the job back.

A good handover should make the property, inspection date, outcome and next-test date impossible to confuse. It should connect each C1, C2 or further-investigation finding with the action taken, the person who took it and the certificate or other written proof that closed it. It should also preserve the original schedule of test results. A final certificate does not help the next inspector if the evidence behind it has disappeared.

That distinction matters because a report and the condition of an installation can drift apart. At 119 Old Mansfield Road in Derby, a landlord supplied a satisfactory EICR dated October 2023. It recorded no C1 or C2 defects. A council-arranged inspection two months later recorded 13 C2 defects. When the landlord later said work had been done, the council asked for minor works certification, but none was supplied. The tribunal also accepted that the lay landlord had been entitled to rely on the first report. Its decision was not a claim of bad faith. It showed how quickly a record chain becomes hard to trust when the inspection, the work and the proof of completion do not agree.

Electricians can fairly object that this sounds like unpaid administration. The legal duty sits with the landlord. A contractor should not have to chase a tenant for access forever, police somebody else's filing system or guarantee what will happen to a property for the next five years. I agree with that.

But the contractor still controls the last few minutes of the job. Clear file names, one property reference, an explicit next-test date and linked proof of remedial work take less time than reconstructing the same facts years later. They can also help protect the contractor if a later inspector asks why an outcome changed.

Current law recognises that access can fail. A landlord who can show that they took all reasonable steps may have a defence, and a tenant's refusal does not by itself mean the landlord had to start court proceedings. That makes the evidence around the attempted visit, messages and rebooking part of the compliance story. A missed appointment kept only on one person's phone is not much of a record.

There is a practical point here as well. A returning inspection may reveal a consumer unit that has changed, remedial work that was never tied back to the earlier report, or a new load added since the last test. The contractor who can read the old evidence before arriving can price, schedule and explain the next job with more confidence. That is not selling around a safety test. It is understanding the work in front of you.

On October 28, 2020, two council officers had to put a notice through a letterbox because the owner would not take it. The report later existed, but not when the tenant or council needed it. Five years on, the best handover is still the simplest one: make sure the next inspection begins with the old report open, not with someone asking where it went.