You’re not going to believe this, but there’s an upcoming piece of legislation that directly benefits landlords for no extra cost. Yep, this one is only good news.
As it stands, when you have your annual gas inspection, there’s a bit of a scrabble to book the engineer for as close as possible to the expiry date of the current gas safety certificate. But, because decent gas engineers are always massively in demand, you can end up having to take any available appointment, which might be several weeks early. Long and short, you can easily find yourself losing weeks that you’ve already paid for.
But, as of 6th April 2018, the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) (Amendment) Regulations 2018 come into force. The new ‘MOT-style’ approach means landlords can have the annual check any time in the 2 months before the expiry of the current certificate but retain the original expiry date.
For example: Your gas safety certificate expires on 27th June 2018. You could have the annual check on 1st May 2018 and the renewal date would be 27th June 2019.
This new rule benefits landlords in three ways:
- You don’t have to worry about trying to find an engineer who can carry out the inspection as close to the expiry date as possible – you’ve got a two-month window
- You don’t lose any of the value of the cost of the annual check
- It simplifies admin, as the expiry date will be the same each year.
Smashing! Just one thing to bear in mind: because there’s now going to be absolutely no excuse for not having a valid certificate, if you are found to be in breach of the law, your local authority is likely to come down very hard on you.
(A parting gift for those well versed in legalese – here’s the full regulation document: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2018/139/made/data.pdf )
