There are 2 questions,

1)it is it safe?

and

2)Is it legal in rented property after 2020 ?


I still have a feeling that it is perfectly safe although it sounds pretty dated - wooden back boxes must make it the very early days of PVC, or an out of date electrician, it is something I associate with rubber cables and a general sense of disappointment.

  I say this is safe  as I think we have RCD cover on the circuits and no class 1 parts.


So for the last however many inspections, it probably should have been flagged ups as  what we now call C3, namely - improvement recommended, not an immediate danger.


But is it legal ? - tricky - especially now it has in effect been condemned.  It is almost worth asking for a second inspection, as if that had been a C3, I suspect this post would not have been written, and it would have stayed as it was until next time.


As a complicating factor when dating installations, for some time after T and E was made with a CPC built in, as the common ceiling roses and so on had no where to put it, quite often the core just got cut back, so a meter test will show an open circuit, if the supply comes via an old fitting, but inspection in the CU and at the load end may show a CPC. And in a pre-internet era, changes to regs and common practice took far longer to reach the folk doing the job. I now know the chap I helped in the 1980s was several years behind in what the regs of the day would have required in terms of earthing,  live working RCDs, testing...


 

There are 2 questions,

1)it is it safe?

and

2)Is it legal in rented property after 2020 ?


I still have a feeling that it is perfectly safe although it sounds pretty dated - wooden back boxes must make it the very early days of PVC, or an out of date electrician, it is something I associate with rubber cables and a general sense of disappointment.

  I say this is safe  as I think we have RCD cover on the circuits and no class 1 parts.


So for the last however many inspections, it probably should have been flagged ups as  what we now call C3, namely - improvement recommended, not an immediate danger.


But is it legal ? - tricky - especially now it has in effect been condemned.  It is almost worth asking for a second inspection, as if that had been a C3, I suspect this post would not have been written, and it would have stayed as it was until next time.


As a complicating factor when dating installations, for some time after T and E was made with a CPC built in, as the common ceiling roses and so on had no where to put it, quite often the core just got cut back, so a meter test will show an open circuit, if the supply comes via an old fitting, but inspection in the CU and at the load end may show a CPC. And in a pre-internet era, changes to regs and common practice took far longer to reach the folk doing the job. I now know the chap I helped in the 1980s was several years behind in what the regs of the day would have required in terms of earthing,  live working RCDs, testing...