Hi. I will be renting out from Oct and I am having brand new gas boiler installed this month. Normally, one must get annual gas boiler safety check and also a gas safety check cert as landlord too? However, as boiler is in first year, is this really legally necessary before July 2026 anyway?
Check a year after fitting
If there is gas hob you definitely need separate certificate. If its just boiler i would have thought the installer would be be happy to give you gas cert for free as doing the work which solves issues with providing documentation to tenant.
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your engineer should give you a new gas cert as part of the installation. If you have other appliances, I would ask them to do those as part of the service (usually no extra charge on a job as big as a boliler install). This will be valid for a year.
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Yes
Make sure you have a gas certificate
You should automatically get one with the new installation
You should get a Commissioning certificate which is what you really need
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The point is to have a document to give to the tenant to reassure them of the gas safety. Therefore you need document it’s not about you getting the document, it’s about the tenant getting a document from an expert third-party.
Yes, you will need a new gas safety certificate or Building Regs Compliance Certificate and serve it on the tenant. See the recent case of Van-Herpen v Green & Green.
er… no… it’s about you arranging to get the document from the contractor and making sure that they fulfil their obligation to also give the tenant a copy of that document.
The tenant has absolutely no obligation to fulfil in this scenario. They can sign to say they’ve received it but they don’t have to even be in the property for the cert to be valid.
Coming at this as a retired gas safe registered engineer;
Bear in mind the engineer will have to check the entire installation, including pipework and meter. Their signature will be at the bottom of the certificate and if they signed a certificate without carrying out any checks they’d be leaving themselves wide open to prosecution. I’d be surprised if you can get anyone to take on that responsibility FOC. There is no onus on the installer to provide a gas safety certificate on installation, it’s up to the engineer in question whether they provide one FOC or charge for it if there was no request to include it in the quote.
Jasonegan7 is correct that you’ll get the commissioning certificate (also known as a benchmark book), but that isn’t proof that your entire gas installation is safe (nor is the building compliance certificate).
My understanding of the Van-Herpen vs Greene and Greene case is that tenants should also receive the BCC as well as a gas certificate. I’ve never heard of a BCC as a legal replacement of a GSC.
On my recent engineer checked pipework and meter as part of installation. He confirmed if these weren’t acceptable he would have to abort the installation as the regulations state these need to be ok to complete a boiler installation so It wouldn’t be additional work to check these..
My understanding of Van-Herpen vs Greene and Greene is that the landlord already had a current CP12 gas safety cert that covered the rest of the installation and so the BRCC was only to cover the new installation.
Taken from Ellisons summary of the case
Decision
“The Judge decided that as the boiler had been ‘checked’ under the purposes of the Gas Safety (Installations and Use) Regulations 1998, a record was required to be made of such checks. The tenants should have been provided with such GSCs (from when the boiler was installed and when the gas engineer returned to the Property 2 months after installation) prior to service of the Section 21 notice.”
Maybe I’m wrong, but I read this to mean the tenant should’ve been provided with a new GSC.
Quote from Nearly Legal:
“…the Judge found that a relevant record was required to be created and served to comply with regulation 36 of the 1998 Regulations. The Learned Judge found that the BRCC was such a relevant record, and thus, the Landlord’s failure to serve the same was fatal to the section 21 notice’s validity.”