Gas Safety Week 2024 (9th to 15th September) is upon us with this year’s theme being “Every [gas safety] Check Counts” as Gas Safe Register’s “latest inspection data reveals 1 in 5 UK homes have an unsafe gas appliance.” Gas Safe Register is the only official gas registration body for gas businesses and gas engineers in the UK and operates on behalf of the Health & Safety Executive.

This alarming statistic has a particularly significant impact on rental properties, where tenants rely on landlords to ensure proper gas safety checks are conducted. Any privately rented property in the UK that utilises gas appliances should have those appliances inspected, by a Gas Safe registered engineer, on an annual basis with a copy of the resulting gas safety certificate provided to the tenant. Where such a property is an HMO or is subject to selective or additional licensing then a copy of a valid (i.e. all the gas appliances have passed the inspection requirements) and unexpired certificate must also be supplied to the relevant Local Authority as part of the licence application supporting documentation.

For Local Authorities using Selective or Additional licensing as part of their regulatory toolkit for keeping private tenants safe in their homes, checking such certificates on an annual basis for validity and currency is, administratively, resource intensive over say, a 5-year licence term.

However, at Home Safe, our solution is to provide our Local Authority partners with a unique dashboard, designed for local government, that alerts relevant council officers or teams with an automatic update alert when a gas safety certificate for any given licensed property is about to expire. This way, an officer doesn’t have to proactively and annually chase up every landlord they may suspect of not updating such property certification; our dashboard does that for them and if the landlord still fails to be gas safe compliant then an officer is informed, effectively, in real time.

But, at the end of the day, the certificate is simply a piece of paper and what the Gas Safe inspection data underlines is that there is no substitute for a professional getting into the property to inspect those appliances. The register though, is not itself a national database of valid or invalid certificates, it is a register of the businesses and individuals with the expertise to work on gas supply to properties and the appliances that use that gas supply inside those properties. The certification process is only triggered at the instruction of a landlord and though many landlords are scrupulously up to date and compliant with their obligations, too many, for a variety of reasons (not necessarily criminal or fraudulent), are not.

Gas Safety Week now in its 14th year is, sadly, still a very necessary public awareness campaign backed by the National Fire Chiefs Council and numerous Local Authorities. With the increasing use of discretionary licensing schemes by Local Authorities, reducing the administrative burden whilst improving the required safety outcomes can only be a benefit for their communities.