Inadequate inspections on the safety of wiring in buildings across England are increasing the risk of fires, E&T has found. A flawed regulatory system has sparked a race to the bottom, with some businesses profiting at the expense of the public’s safety.
Please get in touch with any comments/thoughts you may have
Lets go back to 2004, when the Government were introducing Home Information Packs:
Under Part 5 of the Housing Act 2004 a Home Information Pack (HIP, on lowercase letters: hip), sometimes called a Seller's Pack, was to be provided before a property in England and Wales could be put on the open market for sale with vacant possession.
Home Information Pack - Wikipedia
I seriously considered training as a Home Condition Report Surveyor, I have suitable qualifications and experience including the City and Guilds Construction Technicians and could have been accepted for training, with hindsight it is a probably good thing I did not because I would have spent a lot money and time, including residential training weekends at a University to get the qualification, when the whole thing was very short lived and soon cancelled by the government.
I do still however have a copy of the Royal Institute Of Chartered Surveyors Home Inspectors Book which set out the requirements https://www.amazon.co.uk/Home-Inspectors-Handbook-P-Parnham/dp/1842192035/ref=sr_1_1
The whole scheme was set up with standardised reporting, the whole basis of it being utter regardless who did the report it would always say exactly the same thing and the outcome would be the same. It was intended that there would be absolutely no way of determining who had written the report just by reading particular phrases or descriptions. All surveyors had to do the same training course regardless of if the were a new entrant or an existing chartered surveyor.
But more importantly everything would be coded the same as the expectations were set out and every surveyor trained to do prepare the reports in the same way and used standardised reports.
Had the legislation for the Landlords EICRs followed the same model the scheme would have looked something like this:
NAPIT has actually done a very good job in many respects, with the aid of many well respected contributors, including some I have met and spoken to face to face, they produced the NAPIT Codebreakers giving fairly clear guidance on coding, they then linked this to their online Desktop software so that observations are prepopulated including BS7671 references so that both the person writing the report and the person receiving it can check the relevance of the code and its accuracy.
NAPIT also has a technical helpline allowing someone completing a report to actually talk it through with someone else to justify what is being said in the report, which I had to do several times.
The last EICR I did for the one letting agent was a third floor flat with two consumer unit, peak and off-peak, that have no RCD protection at all, despite having an electric shower in addition to all the other things that now require 30 mA RCD protection.
I was told although it felt completely wrong the right thing to do was pass the flat electrical installation as safe to use and simply list all the recommendations for improvement, despite the fact that if one of my children had been going to rent that flat I would have told them not to. I do not believe that is in the spirit or the intent of the legislation that referenced the current edition of the Electrical Regulations at the time of the introduction of the legislation the 18th Edition, not the 14th, 15th, 16th or 17th editions or maybe an even earlier edition.
The Government has allowed any Tom. Dick or Harriet to carry out the Landlords Safety inspections and produce worthless EICRs and now to is being implied it is the fault of NAPIT and the NICEIC who were never given a mandate to supervise, the blame lies firmly with the Government, though the IET could have been far more proactive as RICS were back in the early 2000's.
To quote Benjamin Franklin "Failing to plan is planning to fail", now the whole thing needs to be done all over again in a couple of years time, so there is a couple of years to sort the mess out, by then I will be well past retiring age but probably still working, however I will be picking and choosing the work I do very carefully and having walked away from doing landlords EICRs last year, I cannot say I will be likely to do many when they are due next time.
Having said that I am still being asked to do EICRs for flats and houses that are currently being rented out illegally.
Lets go back to 2004, when the Government were introducing Home Information Packs:
Under Part 5 of the Housing Act 2004 a Home Information Pack (HIP, on lowercase letters: hip), sometimes called a Seller's Pack, was to be provided before a property in England and Wales could be put on the open market for sale with vacant possession.
Home Information Pack - Wikipedia
I seriously considered training as a Home Condition Report Surveyor, I have suitable qualifications and experience including the City and Guilds Construction Technicians and could have been accepted for training, with hindsight it is a probably good thing I did not because I would have spent a lot money and time, including residential training weekends at a University to get the qualification, when the whole thing was very short lived and soon cancelled by the government.
I do still however have a copy of the Royal Institute Of Chartered Surveyors Home Inspectors Book which set out the requirements https://www.amazon.co.uk/Home-Inspectors-Handbook-P-Parnham/dp/1842192035/ref=sr_1_1
The whole scheme was set up with standardised reporting, the whole basis of it being utter regardless who did the report it would always say exactly the same thing and the outcome would be the same. It was intended that there would be absolutely no way of determining who had written the report just by reading particular phrases or descriptions. All surveyors had to do the same training course regardless of if the were a new entrant or an existing chartered surveyor.
But more importantly everything would be coded the same as the expectations were set out and every surveyor trained to do prepare the reports in the same way and used standardised reports.
Had the legislation for the Landlords EICRs followed the same model the scheme would have looked something like this:
NAPIT has actually done a very good job in many respects, with the aid of many well respected contributors, including some I have met and spoken to face to face, they produced the NAPIT Codebreakers giving fairly clear guidance on coding, they then linked this to their online Desktop software so that observations are prepopulated including BS7671 references so that both the person writing the report and the person receiving it can check the relevance of the code and its accuracy.
NAPIT also has a technical helpline allowing someone completing a report to actually talk it through with someone else to justify what is being said in the report, which I had to do several times.
The last EICR I did for the one letting agent was a third floor flat with two consumer unit, peak and off-peak, that have no RCD protection at all, despite having an electric shower in addition to all the other things that now require 30 mA RCD protection.
I was told although it felt completely wrong the right thing to do was pass the flat electrical installation as safe to use and simply list all the recommendations for improvement, despite the fact that if one of my children had been going to rent that flat I would have told them not to. I do not believe that is in the spirit or the intent of the legislation that referenced the current edition of the Electrical Regulations at the time of the introduction of the legislation the 18th Edition, not the 14th, 15th, 16th or 17th editions or maybe an even earlier edition.
The Government has allowed any Tom. Dick or Harriet to carry out the Landlords Safety inspections and produce worthless EICRs and now to is being implied it is the fault of NAPIT and the NICEIC who were never given a mandate to supervise, the blame lies firmly with the Government, though the IET could have been far more proactive as RICS were back in the early 2000's.
To quote Benjamin Franklin "Failing to plan is planning to fail", now the whole thing needs to be done all over again in a couple of years time, so there is a couple of years to sort the mess out, by then I will be well past retiring age but probably still working, however I will be picking and choosing the work I do very carefully and having walked away from doing landlords EICRs last year, I cannot say I will be likely to do many when they are due next time.
Having said that I am still being asked to do EICRs for flats and houses that are currently being rented out illegally.
We're about to take you to the IET registration website. Don't worry though, you'll be sent straight back to the community after completing the registration.
Continue to the IET registration site
