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Spot the cynic: Call to extend electrical safety checks

Former Community Member
Former Community Member

What do people think of this:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61881979 

The charity Electrical Safety First (ESF) said the checks had found 7,000 faults including exposed live wiring.

Back in 2012, the ESF partnered with the Electrical Contractors’ Association (ECA) to create Certsure, which operates ECA Certification and NICEIC competent person scheme.

Do you think this figure is likely to be higher in reality given what we know about the price war and race to the bottom which affects how inspections are done? We have all heard stories of EICRs deemed satisfactory when they shouldn't have been, of qualified supervisors not properly checking the work carried out by their subcontractors. 

Is it cynical of ESF to release these figures and lobby for more properties to be covered when it is the NICEIC competent person scheme that has been criticised for allowing for subpar checks to be carried out in the first place?

I'd be really interested to get your views....

    

Parents
  • well, at the moment the folk installing the bad wiring are working faster than the folk tidying it up.. Joking aside we do not seem able to manage enough truly competent people to test and maintain rented sector accommodation, so to add to that workload right now seems unwise.

    While photos of smashed socket fronts make a good headline that scarcely needs inspections by a fully qualified sparks to put right. Trickier perhaps would be things with reverse polarity or earth off issues, but even then a plug in tester would find the most obvious dangers quite quickly. Some countries do almost no inspect and test, and work instead to a recipe approach (USA that means you.)  There may a sobering lesson there for those that advocate generating loads of inspection work, rather than encouraging better workmanship - if the socket had not been put there, would it have even got smashed .. that kind of  thing.

    I'm shocked they have only found 7000 faults to be honest.  There are supposed to be about 2,5million rented flats and houses out there if it's only 7000, that's pretty good going. I'd have expected at least 2 million non-compliances of one sort or another, given inspections are to the 2018 regs.

    ~If they have only found 7000 it is easy to show it is not worth it.

    Mike.

Reply
  • well, at the moment the folk installing the bad wiring are working faster than the folk tidying it up.. Joking aside we do not seem able to manage enough truly competent people to test and maintain rented sector accommodation, so to add to that workload right now seems unwise.

    While photos of smashed socket fronts make a good headline that scarcely needs inspections by a fully qualified sparks to put right. Trickier perhaps would be things with reverse polarity or earth off issues, but even then a plug in tester would find the most obvious dangers quite quickly. Some countries do almost no inspect and test, and work instead to a recipe approach (USA that means you.)  There may a sobering lesson there for those that advocate generating loads of inspection work, rather than encouraging better workmanship - if the socket had not been put there, would it have even got smashed .. that kind of  thing.

    I'm shocked they have only found 7000 faults to be honest.  There are supposed to be about 2,5million rented flats and houses out there if it's only 7000, that's pretty good going. I'd have expected at least 2 million non-compliances of one sort or another, given inspections are to the 2018 regs.

    ~If they have only found 7000 it is easy to show it is not worth it.

    Mike.

Children
  • Former Community Member
    Former Community Member in reply to mapj1

    Reading the press release from ESF it looks like they only received granular data from 98 councils. Therefore they say faults across the whole of England could have been as high as 24,000. These are just C1 and C2 faults - as these are the only ones that have to be reported to councils.

    There is a lot more info in the press release than in the BBC article:

    www.electricalsafetyfirst.org.uk/.../