The Housing and Planning Act has made it on to the statute books and it includes electrical safety provisions for the private rented sector. Phil Buckle, director general of campaigning consumer charity Electrical Safety First, explains why electrical checks are necessary.
Electricity kills one person a week, seriously injures 350,000 individuals each year and causes around half of all domestic fires in Great Britain, resulting in billions of pounds of property damage. The personal cost is, of course, immeasurable.
Dangerous electrics in the PRS results in more deaths and injuries than those caused by gas and carbon monoxide poisoning, yet landlords have had to provide annual gas safety certificates since 1998 and the requirement for carbon monoxide alarms came into force last October.
Electrical Safety First has worked long and hard to put electrical safety on par with gas safety. We led the charge to ensure regular electrical checks for PRS properties were included in the recent Housing Acts in Scotland and Wales and sponsored an electrical safety amendment included in the England-only Housing and Planning Act, which gained Royal Assent last May. However, a range of secondary legislation will need to be passed before the Act comes into force (which is not expected until April 2017).
Possible obligations
Under the Act, the Secretary of State can establish regulations placing a positive obligation on landlords to ensure that electrical safety standards are met during a tenancy.
As members of the Department for Communities and Local Government’s PRS Electrical Safety Working Group, we have called for regular electrical checks to be undertaken every five years, or on change of tenancy, of both the installation and any electrical appliance supplied with it. We also consider it imperative that these checks are carried out by a qualified electrician registered with one of the Government’s Competent Person Schemes.
Cost effective
A 2013/14 research in partnership with Shelter and British Gas which indicated many landlords did not know their insurance may be invalidated if they ignore electrical safety in their properties. Our proposals are a cost effective way to protect people and properties as current estimates suggest that a five yearly check would be approximately £100-£150 – equivalent to £3.00 per month. And by ensuring tenants feel safe in reporting repair issues, responsible landlords can maintain their properties more efficiently, thereby saving money and, potentially, saving lives.
This is not an argument for more red tape. Regular electrical checks really are a ‘win-win’ for all.
Extending the scope
While our focus has initially been on electrical safety for the PRS, we were extremely pleased to discover that Glasgow Housing Association (Scotland’s largest social landlord, with almost 40,000 homes in the city) has decided to adopt a five yearly electrical check of its properties.
We hope other social landlords will follow suit – in fact, it’s a safety essential we’d ideally like to see across all housing tenures.
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This opinion piece by Electrical Safety First was featured in Housing Management & Maintenance magazine’s September edition.
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