If you rent out any residential properties, it is essential to have gas safety checks carried out annually by an accredited engineer to ensure you are legally compliant and that your tenants are safe.
Landlords have many legal responsibilities and with new legislation like the Renters Rights Act now in force, these have increased. But none is more important than ensuring that the safety of your tenants is not in doubt.
Our engineers can help to ensure this is the case by carrying out the annual landlord checks you need to meet your legal obligations.
As well as the legal ramifications of failing to ensure you meet your responsibilities, the consequences of anything going wrong due to problems with the gas boiler or other appliances can be catastrophic.
What Can Happen If Gas Appliances Are Not Kept Safe?
In the worst cases, this can include carbon monoxide leaks that can be deadly, or gas fires and explosions that may kill people and destroy the whole property, as well as injure people and damage property in adjacent homes.
Fortunately, these incidents are quite infrequent. For example, government data produced in 2023 in response to a Freedom of Information request revealed that across Greater London:
- There were 26 explosions related to gas in 2020, with eight of them causing fatalities
- In 2019, there were 31 explosions with 13 fatal incidents
- In 2018, there were 29 explosions with 13 fatal incidents
- In 2017, there were 29 explosions and 13 fatal incidents, identical to 2018
- In 2016, there were 40 explosions and 15 fatal incidents
Overall, the numbers have been falling, but every case is one too many. Furthermore, the relatively low numbers would be far higher if landlords did not have legal responsibility for annual checks, or if engineers carrying out checks did not have to be accredited.
To ensure your landlord checks are legal, the key points to remember are:
- The check has to take place every 12 months
- The check must be undertaken by a Gas Safe-accredited engineer
- A copy of the gas safety check should be provided to your tenants within 28 days, or when new tenants move into the property
These responsibilities exist alongside the others you have for ensuring electrical safety, that fire alarms work and that carbon monoxide detectors are present, as well as other fire safety requirements.
What Is The Gas Safe Register?
A critical part of having the check done properly is for the engineer to be Gas Safe registered, because an unregistered engineer may not be properly qualified and this could mean the appliances are unsafe and the safety certificate is invalid.
Our company and engineers are all on the Gas Safe Register, which was established in 2009. By law, all firms and engineers dealing with gas appliances must be on it. This means you can be sure that whoever works with your gas appliances is qualified to do so.
The Register keeps a record of who is accredited and also has the role of tracking down illegal engineers and investigating claims of unsafe work.
On many occasions, gas engineers who are not registered have been prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). An example of this was highlighted by the HSE in February.
This case saw an individual being jailed for 12 months after he carried out unsafe work in the home of a 90-year-old man in south London, having falsely claimed to be Gas Safe Registered. He also issued a fraudulent gas safety certificate.
The alarm was raised after relatives of the customer smelt leaking gas, and an accredited engineer replaced the unsafe boiler with a safe one.
It was the second time the ‘engineer’ had been convicted of carrying out work after falsely claiming to be on the Gas Safe register, when in fact he had never been on it.
How Can You Be Sure Your Engineer Is On The Gas Safe Register?
This is far from the only prosecution the HSE has carried out of rogue gas workers, which shows it is important to check the credentials of anyone carrying out gas inspections or other work, rather than just taking their word for it if they say they are registered.
Those who are on the Gas Safe register will be supplied with ID cards to show they are on the register, and customers, including landlords, will be fully within their rights to ask to see it. Engineers who are on the register will have no problem with showing it.
By ensuring an annual check is carried out and checking that you are using fully qualified and accredited staff, you can be sure that your property and tenants are as safe as possible and that you are fully compliant with the law.