First, the part that is not administrative #
An electrical installation certificate, a minor electrical installation works certificate and an electrical installation condition report are records of professional judgement. The inspection, the testing, the classification of observed defects and the decision to declare an installation satisfactory or unsatisfactory are the duty of the competent person doing the work and of the business employing them.
We say that at the top because the rest of this page is about the clerical layer around those documents, and it would be easy to read the two as the same thing. They are not. What follows concerns who gets a copy, by when, and who has to be told.
The deadlines in rented property, exactly #
For residential property in England, the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020 set out a cycle in regulation 3. The duties fall on the landlord, but in practice your report is what starts every clock:
| Event | Deadline |
|---|---|
| Inspection and testing | At intervals of no more than 5 years, or a shorter interval if the last report specified one |
| Report to existing tenants | Within 28 days of the inspection and test |
| Report to the local housing authority | Within 7 days of receiving a written request from that authority |
| Report to a prospective tenant | Within 28 days of receiving a written request from that prospective tenant |
| Further investigative or remedial work | Within 28 days, or the period specified in the report if less |
| Written confirmation that the work is done | Within 28 days of completing it, to tenants and the local housing authority |
at least every 5 years by a properly qualified person
Which parts of this run on rules #
The test is whether two competent people with the same inputs would produce the same output. Applied here, the split is unusually clean.
Runs on rules
- Transcribing site readings into the certificate, which is where double keying lives
- Getting the report to the landlord within the deadline
- Knowing which of your reports are due for renewal, and when, which is arithmetic on a date
- Retrieving a report issued two years ago on request, if it was filed against the property
Needs the competent person
- Carrying out the inspection and test, which is a legal duty
- Classifying observations and coding them
- Deciding the remedial scope and pricing it
Transcribing the readings is the biggest single time sink in most electrical firms and nobody calls it automation. They call it putting it in twice.
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Readings are taken on site
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Written on a pad or into an app
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Typed again into certification software in the office
Often by a different person, who has to ring the engineer about a number they cannot read.
That is the same pattern the Department for Education named in its own workload work as re-entry of data into multiple systems, and it shows up in every sector we look at.
The renewal list you probably do not have #
Here is a question worth asking your office: can we list every EICR we have issued, with the property, the landlord, and the date the next one is due? Most firms of under twenty people cannot, or can only do it by opening a folder of PDFs.
That list is pure rules. Every report carries a date and a stated interval, and a renewal date is a subtraction. Not having it does not create a compliance problem for you, because the duty sits with the landlord. It creates a commercial one, because the work you already won and are entitled to be asked about goes to whoever contacts the landlord first.
Schemes, notification and who tells the council #
Notifiable electrical work in dwellings sits under Approved Document P, the Building Regulation in England covering electrical safety in dwellings, which GOV.UK describes as explaining when notification of work is required. Installers registered with an authorised competent person scheme can self certify rather than going to building control first. The current list of schemes on GOV.UK includes Certsure, trading as NICEIC, and NAPIT for electrical installations in dwellings.
The mechanics of who notifies whom, and what the customer should end up holding, are covered on building control notifications. The parallel cycle for gas work, which has a much shorter distribution deadline, is on landlord gas safety records. If you want to put hours against any of this first, start with the which tasks run on rules.
What we would look at #
In an audit of an electrical contractor, three questions do most of the work.
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How many times does a single test result get typed by a human before it reaches a customer?
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How long does it take to produce a named report from three years ago?
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Can anyone say, without opening a folder, which reports fall due in the next ninety days?
The answers tend to be three, twenty minutes, and no.