The duty is not yours, but the calendar is #
The gas safety duties in rented accommodation belong to the landlord and, for the work itself, to the Gas Safe registered engineer. A heating firm does not take on those duties by holding the records.
What is true is that a plumbing and heating business servicing a few hundred rented properties is running the calendar that the landlord's compliance depends on. When the reminder does not go out, the landlord does not notice until the certificate has expired, and the call you get is not a friendly one.
The cycle, with the deadlines #
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First check on a new appliance or flue Within 12 months of installation
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Subsequent checks Annually
By a Gas Safe registered engineer.
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Copy to existing tenants Within 28 days
Of the check being completed.
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Copy to new tenants Before they move in
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Landlord retention of the record 2 years
A tenancy start date is the landlord's information, not yours, and it can move. Any firm that has been asked at four o'clock on a Friday for a record so a tenancy can complete on the Monday knows what that costs.
Which parts of this run on rules #
The useful test is whether two competent people, given the same inputs, would do the same thing. Applied to a heating firm's gas safety work:
Runs on rules
- Knowing which properties fall due in the next 60 days, which is a date and an interval
- Prompting the landlord or agent to book the visit
- Getting the record to the landlord after the visit
- Producing a record from eighteen months ago on request, if it was filed against the property rather than the job
Date arithmetic, prompting and retrieval, all the way down.
Needs a person
- The check itself, and everything recorded on the record, which is a legal duty of the Gas Safe registered engineer
- Deciding whether an appliance is safe to leave in service, and never anything else
- Chasing access when a tenant will not let the engineer in, which is often the landlord's problem rather than yours
In most firms everything on the rules side is done by one person with a spreadsheet, and the quality of the whole operation depends on that person not being on holiday.
The filing question that decides everything #
There is a structural choice underneath this, and firms rarely make it deliberately. Are your records filed against the job, or against the property?
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Filed against the job
The default in most systems. The records are easy to find while the job is live and progressively harder afterwards.
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Filed against the property
The question “what has ever been done at 14 Mill Lane, and when is the next one due” has a one click answer, which is the question every landlord and agent actually asks.
That is a diagnosis rather than a recommendation of any product. But it explains why two firms with the same software can have completely different experiences of the same workload, and it is usually the first thing worth establishing.
The same shape, in other trades #
Gas is not unusual in this. The electrical equivalent, with its own statutory deadlines for rented property, is on electrical certificates and EICR deadlines, and the question of who notifies building control on a notifiable job is covered on building control notifications.
GOV.UK lists Gas Safe Register among the authorised competent person schemes, alongside the electrical, glazing, roofing and heating schemes, which is why the administrative pattern repeats across every trade that certifies its own work.
If you want to put hours against the renewal and distribution cycle before deciding anything, the cost of admin time calculator is the place to start, and an audit counts it properly.