The NICEIC Help Hub – Householders and landlords

Please contact the business who undertook the work to request a copy of an installation certificate. Duplicate copies of Building Regulations Certificates of Compliance can be purchased at checkmynotification.com/.

NICEIC is unable to confirm the validity of a certificate, as this would require us to physically check the work and cross-reference the results, which is outside our remit. If you have received an NICEIC-branded certificate, we can check the details the business has provided and confirm what types of work they are certified to undertake. Please call our Customer Services team on 0333 015 6625 (selecting options 5 and 3), to find out more.

If the job only involved an addition or an alteration to an existing circuit, the work can be certified using a Minor Electrical Installation Work Certificate (MEIWC), often referred to as a Minor Works Certificate. You’d expect an MEIWC if you had a light fixture repaired, had a power socket moved or installed, or needed a circuit breaker or fuse replaced.

You should receive an MEIWC for each existing circuit which has been added to or altered.

If the job involved a new circuit or the installation of a new consumer unit or distribution board, you should receive an Electrical Installation Certificate (EIC). You’d expect an EIC if, for example, you had your house rewired or got solar panels installed. An EIC may also be issued as an alternative to multiple minor works certificates, when more than one existing circuit is added to or altered.

Although there’s no set timeframe for the issuing of an MEIWC or EIC, we would generally expect you to receive a fully completed certificate shortly after your electrician finishes the job. If you haven’t received your certificate within a month, please follow our complaints procedure.

A Building Regulation Certificate of Compliance (Part P) is also required for any ‘notifiable’ electrical jobs. A notifiable job is one that must be approved by local building control. You’d need a Part P certificate for changes to a consumer unit, a full rewire, the installation of new circuits, any addition or alteration to an existing circuit in a ‘special location’, or a new full electrical installation (for example, a new build home).

When required, we allow our certified businesses 25 days to notify electrical work to the local authority. If you’ve had a notifiable job done and still haven’t received a Building Regulation Certificate of Compliance after a month, please follow our complaints procedure.

Dates on the certificate must align with the date the job was completed. Please also note that the certified business’s Qualified Supervisor is required to review the certificate, and that this review will take place after the work is completed in your home.

Electrical certificates should be signed by the individual(s) responsible for the design, construction, inspection and testing of the electrical installation work. NICEIC certificates are then reviewed and countersigned by the business’s Qualified Supervisor (QS), who is ultimately responsible for the safety and quality of their company’s electrical work. The QS does not need to physically inspect the work in order to sign their section. If all sections are signed by someone who has never visited your property, you would need to first raise this with the business directly in writing via letter or email. In the unlikely event that the business is unable to help, please follow our complaints process to have this reviewed.

Unless your EIC is less than five years old and for either a complete rewire or a newly built property, it will not meet the government's requirements and a safety report will need to be carried out.

The best option is to search using your postcode on our Find a Trusted Tradesperson tool, which will bring up local NICEIC-certified businesses. If they are certified to do electrical safety reports, they will have ‘Rental Safety Report’ listed under their schemes. You can also search on the Electrical Competent Person website by entering your postcode and selecting ‘To undertake an electrical safety report’.

No. Unless you were told at your last inspection that a safety check was needed sooner, safety checks are required at least every five years. However, we recommend that landlords carry out visual inspections of the property following a change of tenancy to establish whether further safety checks are required.

The business does not need to provide a new satisfactory report once remedial works have been completed. Instead, they should provide an appropriate certificate for the remedial works, which should confirm that the remedial work required to correct the unsatisfactory items has been completed.
 

Please ensure you have read and understood our complaints process – this will help you understand what we can and can’t do with regards to complaints.
If you would like guidance on work that has been undertaken, the contractor you hired might have to come back for an inspection. In the first instance, please contact the business that did the work.

Once you have checked whether or not NICEIC can help with your complaint, please send the business an email or letter detailing your concerns, giving them a minimum of 10 days to respond.

If the business fails to respond, you can then fill out our complaint form and forward it to complaints@certsure.com for review. Please be advised that we will need evidence from you in order to verify and process your complaint.

You can find out more about our complaints process here.

As part of our complaints process, we do require you to allow the original contractor to come back and put things right. If you really don’t want the contractor to come back, you might want to explore other avenues to get things sorted, such as Citizens Advice or the small claims court.

Please make sure that your complaint is something NICEIC is able to help with. You can find out more about what we can and can’t do with regards to complaints on our complaints page.