9The register kept per building, and the intervals it runs on
A certificate register is kept per building and names, for each item, the certificate held, the party that issued it, the date of issue and the date of expiry, whereas the interval is taken from the regulation or standard governing that item and is not set by the company.
The recurring items are the electrical installation condition report on a five-year interval for a rented dwelling, the gas safety record on a twelve-month interval where a relevant appliance is present, the energy performance certificate on a ten-year interval, and emergency lighting and alarm testing on the intervals set by the standards they were installed to.
The registration or accreditation number of the issuing party is filed with the certificate itself, since a certificate is only as good as the competence behind it and a number recorded at the time is far easier to check than one reconstructed afterwards.
9.4Electrical installation condition report
A report on the condition of the fixed electrical installation of a rented dwelling, carried at a five-year interval, returned with a classification against each observation. The register carries the report, its date and the classification, and the maintenance schedule carries whatever remedial work the classification calls for.
9.5Gas safety record
Held on a twelve-month interval wherever a relevant gas appliance, pipe or flue is present, and instructed to an engineer on the Gas Safe register. Where a building has no gas supply at all the register carries that fact explicitly rather than an empty line, because an empty line and a deliberate absence look identical a year later.
9.6Energy performance certificate
Runs on a ten-year interval from the date of assessment and attaches to the unit rather than to the letting, in which case a change of occupier inside the ten years does not call for a new one. The band it records also constrains whether a unit may be let at all, which is why it is read before a void is marketed and not afterwards.
9.7Emergency lighting and alarm testing
Tested at the intervals set by the standards the systems were installed to, which means the interval comes from the installation and not from a portfolio-wide convention. The test notes join the building register in the same way a certificate does, and they are read as part of the fire risk assessment rather than beside it.
9.8Legionella and fire risk assessments
Both are assessments rather than certificates, and both carry their own review interval inside the document that produced them, so the register takes the review date from the assessment itself and diaries backwards from that.
An assessment that recommends work puts that work into the maintenance schedule on the date the assessment gives it, whereas an assessment filed without its recommendations being scheduled is a document that has been read and not acted on.
10Where a check falls due
The compliance list is derived from the certificate register and the maintenance schedule together, so everything falling due arrives in one place and in date order, and an item leaves it only when the replacement certificate or the completion evidence has been filed against the building.
Checks are instructed to parties competent for the item — a Gas Safe registered engineer for gas work, a qualified person for the condition report on the electrical installation — and where a check cannot be completed in time the reason is recorded, the instruction reissued, and the unit held back from letting until the certificate is in hand.
A unit held back in this way is a void with a reason attached, and it is reported as one, to the extent that a portfolio showing an unexplained fall in occupancy and a portfolio showing three units held for certification are telling two entirely different stories about the same number.
The list is worked in date order and reviewed once a month alongside the open repairs, which is the point in the reporting cycle where the two logs are read against each other and anything that has fallen between them is picked up.