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.

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:

The below documents 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.