Eicr rented

[Pretty Mouth]

@UNG , should I infer from your lack of answer to my question that you do think that forcing a landlord to have 10 EICRs during a 5 year period is reasonable? And presumably these wouldn't be the £80 ones that you'd warned your landlord client off, these would the full £250 ones?

You are arguing from the point of a landlord but then seem concerned about the cost of private rents being increased because of cost of additional checks on a change of tenacy with your hidden profile I am finding it difficult to understand where you are coming from

I don't follow you here: what do you hope to learn from my profile? My rental status? Whether I'm a landlord or not? If it helps: I rent my home, from a landlord, via an agency.

While I can partly see your point you keep referring to the landlord doing a regular inspection, what about the absent landlord who relies on the letting agent, will the letting agent want to take the responsibility of doing the regular property inspections and confirming the electrical installation is safe for continued use

I believe landlords pay agents to do exactly this - ensure their property is well looked after by the tenant. In my case, a deposit was taken of 1.5 months rent, and an outside company compiled an inventory and report on the condition of the property, in tedious detail, with photos - this included electrical accessories. If I break something, it gets taken out of my deposit, and I'm not allowed to change anything. The agents have carried out 3 inspections in the 4 years I have been here, though not since covid.

Then you start to encroach on the EAWR and competence, but ultimately it all comes down to a serious incident and litigation and that man in the wig to find out whether those involved have properly discharged their responsibilities and duty of care in the most appropriate manner

I'm not an expert on law (as I assume most of us here aren't), so I'm not going to speculate on what might happen in court.

From a layperson's perspective, if a landlord carries out occasional inspections, and checks the place over at the end of the tenancy ((s)he will want to do this anyway, to ensure the tenant isn't trashing the place), it's hard to see what a tenant could do to the electrical installation that wouldn't get picked up on, unless it was deliberately very well hidden. Hard to blame the LL for that.

 

[littlespark]

Some landlords buy house hardly looking at them…. Trusting an agent to check it over for them….
Mr Tenant doesn’t like the white light switch, and changes it for a decorative metal… and makes a hash of it.
No one on a casual visual inspection notices.

fast forward, no eicr done. Change of tenancy.
In the meantime, dodgy wire drops out and is touching the metal switch. DIY Dave hadn’t connected the earth wire.

new tenants 5 year old kiddy gets a shock off the switch.

Exaggerated I know, but that’s the reason there are EICRs done.
No landlord can trust their tenant 100% not to fiddle with something.

 

[Pretty Mouth]

Some landlords buy house hardly looking at them…. Trusting an agent to check it over for them….
Mr Tenant doesn’t like the white light switch, and changes it for a decorative metal… and makes a hash of it.
No one on a casual visual inspection notices.

fast forward, no eicr done. Change of tenancy.
In the meantime, dodgy wire drops out and is touching the metal switch. DIY Dave hadn’t connected the earth wire.

new tenants 5 year old kiddy gets a shock off the switch.

Exaggerated I know, but that’s the reason there are EICRs done.
No landlord can trust their tenant 100% not to fiddle with something.

This situation is certainly possible, however would have been avoided by the agent simply doing his/her job properly. An inventory at the start of the tenancy, and checked out at the end would have identified the swap. The cheapest of the cheap EICR (the sort a landlord is likely to go for should (s)he be made to have them too often, and the likes of which we see all too often on these forums) would not necessarily have identified the fault.

 

[littlespark]

Yes. I know… extreme scenario.

I’m still arguing the Scottish side where my earlier link did state before tenancy, and 5 years during… which the tester them self could bring the next eicr quicker if they saw a problem that needed more frequent checking.

And we have 6 month short assured tennancys, so it could be 2x EICRs in one year.

Again, up to the tester how much of a test they perform… A newly built house, with previous test certs won’t take as long as a recent purchased older property with dubious history.

It’s down to landlords have to ensure the safety of their tenants. Not just electrically. They will have a gas safety test every year, and no one fiddles with the gas system… so why does it need checked??

All it takes is for a tenant to die, or a tower block to go up in flames and we will be doing EICRs on an annual basis

 

[UNG]

As the advert said "where there is blame there's a claim" and the madness of some litigation these days means that if someone can get money out of a claim they will try as the no win no fee lawyers mean it costs very little to do it

 

[pirate]

This an extremely interesting thread, and I have read all the contributions with interest, as I was once a landlord and also a managing agent for other landlords. As a private landlord my rentals were fortunately in "good" areas where interference with the electrical installation by tenants is extremely rare...certainly never occurred on my properties. There is the other end of the scale, the "Salamander Street" scenario, where interference was commonplace due to the type of tenants involved.
As a letting agent we made sure all certificates for gas and electrial safety were in place at the start of a tenancy, along with the other documents required by Scottish legislation...however, we did not ever offer a periodic inspection and report to the landlords, most of whom lived fairly close by and did those inspections themselves.
As @littlespark mentioned, we had/have short assured tenancies, but these have been replaced by new PRS tenancies with no end-date and no automatic right for the landlord to terminate after due notice. This has led to many landlords leaving the rental market as it added another problem to the list including the restriction of mortgage relief and the ADS, additional dwelling supplement which broadly meant that if you had a home, and bought another one to rent out, you had to pay an additional 4% stamp duty, plus numerous other rules and regulations. I should clarify that Short Assured tenancies which were in place and remain so after the introduction of the new PRS are still valid under the old rules, but the paperwork is/was the same. In this area, I do believe the Scottish approach was a tougher regime than south of the border.
I digress. Good landlords will ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, the safety of their tenants.
Bad landlords don't give a flying foxtrot, and will either try to evade the regulations or show bare adherence in the cheapest possible way. In the end, it all boils down to the degree of care, and a sensible and stateable case for when you choose to do the EICR, and after 3 years of "one careful tenant" you might leave it for another 2 years, or you might not, depending on what you find when a tenant vacates.
However...whatever approach you take, the man in a wig is not likely to be your friend unless you can convince him you took all reasonable steps...if it can be shown the property clearly had dodgy electrics at the end of one tenancy, the fact that an EICR wasn't "due" for another year will be a poor defence.

 

[Simon47]

I can understand your point to some extent but over a 5 year period the tenancy could change possibly 10 times or more so if an incident occurs beyond the first rental period involving the electrical installation that causes serious injury or death who is responsible and in the litigation firing line
Is the fact the legislation says 5 years a valid and adequate defence I would think not

And we don't re-do gas safety checks on change of tenant either, and I've never seen/heard any suggestion that we should.

Mr Tenant doesn’t like the white light switch, and changes it for a decorative metal… and makes a hash of it.
No one on a casual visual inspection notices.

fast forward, no eicr done. Change of tenancy.
In the meantime, dodgy wire drops out and is touching the metal switch. DIY Dave hadn’t connected the earth wire.

And I put forward an alternative scenario. EICR is done, that particular switch isn't one of the sampled ones, so the fault is not picked up. So what value the EICR ?

And heading off your response to that - you do 100% inspection of everything that's accessible. Great, you are now advocating disturbing almost every joint in the installation possibly every 6 months - and don't consider that to have a risk in itself ? C.f. all the fires which we suspect as having been caused by meter fitters disturbing the tails into the CU main switch.

No landlord can trust their tenant 100% not to fiddle with something.

True. But the sort that will are mostly the sort that aren't clever enough not to leave any signs.

I would suggest that a landlord that knows their property can do a visual inspection between tenants and see if anything has been fiddled with. I wouldn't trust an agent to notice if half the property was missing - OK, perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, I stopped using agents for management many years ago because I found them useless at it.
As I have the kit, I can do a minimally invasive (and hence minimally disruptive to all the connections) 100% r1+r2 test and thus be confident that at a minimum the polarity is correct and the earthing/binding is intact. Add whole-installation IR and RCD tests and that's most of an EICR done anyway.

I did ask one of our lasses if they've had any tests done yet. She did say someone came round, but she's seen no paperwork. I suggested she ask for it, be interesting to see how many of the "can spot that without looking" faults they've missed.
But at the moment she's more interested in getting them to fix the roof. Ah, that reminds me, I was supposed to let her know who to contact at the council since the agent isn't responding to requests.
And that's what really pees me off - some of us care, and invest in our properties, while others skimp on essentials and nothing is done about it.