Domestic Premises (Electrical Safety Certificate) Bill [HL]

Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 15th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I start by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, on his excellent Bill, which I am delighted to be speaking in support of today. I also thank the charity Electrical Safety First and the other campaigners who have highlighted for many years the problems we have with electrical safety in this country and how important it is to get this right. There have been improvements in recent years, but this would be another step forward. I hope that we get a good response from the Government and can actually move this forward. I very much support the Bill. If your Lordships support it, I hope that we will see no amendments, because we need to ensure that it gets a speedy passage through this House and is sent to the other place quickly. The best way to do that is not to amend it and to let it move on; I hope that that happens.

I start my remarks with the experience of somebody I will call Sean. He was a first-time buyer who stepped on to the property ladder. A few months after moving into his property, his fuse box started to spark. Once he managed to switch it off, he got an electrician round. In the end, he had to fork out over £10,000 to repair the damage to his property and rewire the entire house. He cannot help thinking—and I agree with him—that this all could have been avoided if he had got an electrical installation condition report done before he bought his home. Of all the residential sales in recent years, particularly in 2017-18, only 37% of those who bought properties undertook an electrical safety check beforehand. One in five of those buyers believed that the checks would be in other survey reports that are done when you buy a home, and a further third of buyers soon found electrical safety problems that they were not aware of before purchasing their property.

Electrical safety checks on domestic properties are slipping through the cracks. This Bill, introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, provides a sealing device for those gaping holes in our legislation. The National Inspection Council for Electrical Installation Contracting recommends inspections of all domestic wiring installations every 10 years or when there is a change of ownership, whichever is first. As it stands, those selling properties are under no legal obligation to carry out thorough electrical safety checks before putting their properties on the market. It is down to the buyer to ensure that the property they wish to purchase is electrically safe. But should we rely on the buyer to carry out these checks? We cannot be sure that the buyer knows that they should do this—from the example I gave, we can see that they do not. This surely cannot be right.

As the evidence makes apparent, the implementation of this Bill is already far too late. The achievement of stepping on to the property ladder can be ruined by poor electrical safety. Putting the onus on those who sell their property to provide electrical safety certificates would save buyers thousands of pounds. But, of course, this is not merely about money. According to the calculations of Electrical Safety First, over 19,000 accidental domestic fires in the UK are of electrical origin. What is more, there are around 70 fatalities and 350,000 serious injuries in the UK due to electricity each year. As this charity puts it,

“you could be saving more than just money by getting the electrics checked.”

This is not just a matter of saving money; it is a matter of saving lives. We should treat this Bill with the urgency it deserves.

The director-general of the Electrical Safety Council has given ample warning of the way in which electrical ignorance plagues our population. In his words,

“Even though we are using more electrical products than ever before, there is a worrying gap between the public’s perception of electrical danger and the reality, with people making simple yet potentially fatal errors that can be easily prevented”.


We cannot continue to rely on buyers to carry out electrical safety checks before buying a property. Let us not wait for another warning from electrical safety experts. Let us not wait for another Grenfell Tower tragedy. We should support this Bill in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Foster, today. I look forward to the Minister’s response, and I hope that it is a supportive one.