The first is "what am I, as a landlord, supposed to do?" The second is "what happens if I don't?" They sound like the same question. They are answered by two different parts of the same regulations, and they land on two different people — you, and your local housing authority. Getting that distinction right matters, because the advice for each is not interchangeable.
Your duty sits in one place: regulation 3
For privately rented homes in England, the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020 (SI 2020/312) set out the landlord's obligations, and every one of them sits in regulation 3. In summary:
- Regulation 3(1)(b) — you must ensure the electrical installation is inspected and tested by a qualified person.
- Regulation 3(2)(a) — that inspection must happen at intervals of no more than five years.
- Regulation 3(3) — you must supply a copy of the report to the tenant within 28 days of the inspection.
- Regulation 3(4) — where the report requires remedial or further investigative work, you must carry it out within 28 days, or sooner if the report specifies a shorter period.
- Regulation 3(5) — once that work is done, you must obtain written confirmation from the person who carried it out that the safety standard is met, and supply it to the tenant.
Every one of those steps is a landlord's duty. Miss one and the failure is yours, not the council's. Our guide to EICR landlord requirements in London goes through that timeline in full, and our EICR certificate cost page explains what an inspection actually involves and why remedial work is priced separately once the report exists.
The council's part is a different regulation, doing a different job
Regulation 4 of the same instrument is not a second version of the landlord's checklist. It places a duty on the local housing authority — Westminster City Council for most addresses across W1, W2, NW8 and W9 — to act if it has reason to believe a landlord is not complying with regulation 3. That is a separate obligation, held by a different party, and it exists to give tenants a route to enforcement if their landlord doesn't do what regulation 3 requires.
This is worth stating plainly because it is easy to conflate the two in conversation, and getting it backwards has real consequences: a landlord who assumes regulation 4 describes their own paperwork trail is looking in the wrong place, and may miss that their actual obligations end at regulation 3(5).
What we won't do here is describe the exact mechanics of how a local housing authority exercises its regulation 4 duty — the form any notice takes, the timescales it sets, or what follows if it isn't complied with — because that detail runs into further parts of the regulations that we have not checked against the current statutory text for this article. If you have already received correspondence from a local authority about a rental property, treat that letter as the definitive source of what is being asked of you, and take advice on it rather than relying on a general guide.
Why the distinction changes what you should actually do
In practice, almost nobody who runs their EICR obligations properly ever needs to think about regulation 4 at all. It only becomes relevant once regulation 3 has already been missed — a report that's overdue, a tenant who never received a copy, remedial work that was flagged and never completed. The sensible position is to treat regulation 3 as the whole of your job and make sure none of its five steps quietly lapse, rather than to think of enforcement as a second layer of compliance to plan around.
That's especially true if you manage a licensed HMO, where scrutiny of electrical safety tends to be higher and more frequent — see our page on HMO licensing in Westminster for how that licensing regime interacts with the property's condition. And if you hold several properties, the practical risk isn't any one deadline — it's a spreadsheet where two or three flats have quietly drifted past their five-year mark because nobody diarised them properly. Our landlord maintenance checklist for Central London sets out how to run EICR and gas safety dates as a calendar rather than a memory test, and our landlord electrical safety standards page explains how the codes in an EICR report decide whether you have remedial work at all.
What the report actually asks of you
An EICR is a set of coded observations, not a pass/fail slip. Some observations require action; others are simply noted. The report itself should tell you which category each finding sits in, and a competent electrician will walk you through that rather than leave you to interpret a PDF. If the report is unsatisfactory, the clock in regulation 3(4) starts — 28 days, or sooner if the report says so — and that is the point where minor electrical work (fault-finding, socket and switch repairs, small fixes flagged in the report) is worth booking promptly rather than letting it sit. Our electrician call-outs start from £80, and anything with a defined scope is quoted as a fixed price before work begins — see our electrical service page for what that covers.
The takeaway
Regulation 3 is your job. Regulation 4 is the council's, and it only comes into play if regulation 3 has already slipped. Run the five landlord steps as a calendar with lead time — inspect and test within five years, report to the tenant within 28 days, fix within 28 days, confirm in writing — and the question of what a local housing authority can do about it never needs to become a live one for your properties.
Nothing on this page is legal advice. Requirements under SI 2020/312 and its enforcement provisions can be amended, and if you are already dealing with a local authority about a specific property, get advice on the current wording of the regulations for your circumstances rather than relying on a general guide.
If you have an EICR report in hand with remedial items flagged, send us a photo of the report or the consumer unit and we'll tell you what the findings mean and what fixing them costs.