What landlords have to do about electrical safety

What exactly does the law require?

The Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020 apply to most private tenancies in England. In plain terms they ask four things of you.

• Have the fixed electrical installation inspected and tested by a qualified person at intervals of no more than five years.
• Get a report, which is an EICR, and act on what it says.
• Supply that report to the tenant within 28 days, to a new tenant before they move in, and to the council within seven days if it asks.
• Where the report requires work, have it done within 28 days, or sooner if the report specifies a shorter period, and get written confirmation that it is finished.

Scotland and Wales have their own rules with different detail, so if you hold property across borders do not assume the English timetable applies everywhere.

What makes a report satisfactory or unsatisfactory?

An EICR is not a pass or fail in the way an MOT is. The inspector records observations with codes, and the codes decide the outcome.

• C1, danger present. Risk of injury, immediate action required. The report is unsatisfactory. Anything C1 should be made safe on the day it is found.
• C2, potentially dangerous. Urgent remedial action required. The report is unsatisfactory. This is the most common reason a rental fails.
• FI, further investigation required. The report is unsatisfactory. Something could not be resolved on the visit and needs chasing down.
• C3, improvement recommended. The report can still be satisfactory. You do not legally have to act, though it is usually sensible and cheap to.

The practical point for a landlord is that C3 does not fail you. If a report comes back unsatisfactory purely on C3 items, ask the question, because something has been coded wrongly.

What happens if I miss the 28 days?

The council can serve a remedial notice, and if you do not comply it can arrange the work itself and recover the cost from you. It can also impose a financial penalty of up to thirty thousand pounds for a breach.

The number that surprises people is that penalties can be applied per breach rather than once per landlord, so a portfolio with the same problem in several properties is not one fine.

There is also the deposit and eviction angle. Compliance failures are increasingly raised in possession proceedings, so a missing certificate can become an expensive problem long after the inspection was due.

How do people actually keep on top of this?

Badly, mostly, and not through carelessness. Five years is exactly the wrong interval: long enough that nobody diaries it and short enough to come round again before you have forgotten the last one. Add a few properties bought at different times and the dates scatter.

What works is somebody else holding the dates. We keep the expiry date for every property we certify and tell you before it runs out, rather than waiting for you to ask. It costs nothing and it is the single most useful thing we do for landlords, because the fine is never for unsafe wiring, it is for a lapsed piece of paper.

If you run a portfolio, our landlord and letting agent page covers how we handle several properties at once.

What if the tenant will not give access?

You are expected to take reasonable steps, and to be able to show you took them. Write to the tenant, keep the correspondence, and repeat it. A landlord who has genuinely tried and been refused is in a very different position from one who did not get round to it.

You are not required to break in, and you should not. Keep the paper trail and the regulations recognise it.

Questions we get asked about this