Social Housing

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Electrical Safety In Social Housing

The Electrical Safety Roundtable’s Social Housing Sub-Group brings together representatives from Social Housing Providers across the country to develop standardised electrical safety guidance for the sector.

The Sub-Group was established due to concerns that the lack of consistent advice for the sector meant that housing standards could vary across the country. Because of this:

25% of social housing properties do not have the Government’s recommended five electrical safety features (PVC wiring, modern earthing, a modern consumer unit, MCB [miniature circuit board] and RCD [residual current device]) and installed¹.
12% of social housing properties failed the Government’s Decent Homes criteria².

Let Me In!

The Electrical Safety in Social Housing Sub-Group has launched a tenant-focused campaign that aims to educate and allow access for essential safety checks. Information on the dangers of electrical installations should be made available to tenants in a clear and accessible way.

The 'Safety Starts at Your Door Let Me In!' campaign aims to engage social housing providers and tenants, ensuring the safety of electrical installations and equipment within their properties. Social housing tenants granting access to their homes for the electrical safety check to be carried out remains a concern.

It is key that we keep tenants educated about electrical safety and encourage access for electrical safety checks.

Social Housing Access Leaflet

This leaflet includes:

Statistics and information explaining the dangers of electricity
An explanation of why electrical checks must be carried out
Information on what happens during an electrical inspection

If you are a Social Housing provider, click here to download a copy of this leaflet which includes space for your organisation’s details.

Code of Practice

The documents below were created by the Sub-Group to provide best practice guidance for Social Housing providers, and to help tenants to understand why electrical inspections are important. Please use these free to download documents in any way you deem to be useful.

Code of Practice for the Management of Electrotechnical Care in Social Housing

This Code of Practice sets out:

Code of Practice Summary Document

This document details the key recommendations made in the Code of Practice in a brief, easy-to-read summary.

The ESR Social Housing Sub-Group virtually met to share experiences and views which enabled us to create a response to the “Supporting the Social Rented Sector in ensuring electrical safety for tenants – A policy consultation paper from Electrical Safety First” this focused on mandatory electrical safety checks in the social housing sector. Click here to see our response.

In November 2020 the Social Housing sub-group had a fantastic opportunity to raise awareness of the ESR. Our chairman was joined by a number of members of the group, to sit on a panel at Aico’s Virtual Smarter Homes Conference which explored the impact of Covid-19 , The Grenfell Tragedy, the use of smart technologies and mandatory electrical safety checks in the social housing sector. Watch the video below:

¹Source: MHCLG ‘Disrepair and Electrics’ statistics, 2016

²Source: MHCLG ‘Decent Homes – dwellings’ statistics, 2016

The above documents were created with the support of:

Nottingham Community Housing Association