Part P: which electrical jobs are notifiable, and how to sign off

Part P is one sentence long. Requirement P1 of Schedule 1 to the Building Regulations 2010:

Reasonable provision shall be made in the design and installation of electrical installations in order to protect persons operating, maintaining or altering the installations from fire or injury.

That is it. No circuit list, no test schedule, no mention of notification. Everything electricians argue about lives somewhere else in the regulations, and knowing where saves a lot of time.

Where Part P applies

Schedule 1 sets limits on application. Part P applies only to electrical installations intended to operate at low or extra-low voltage and which are:

• "in or attached to a dwelling";
• "in the common parts of a building serving one or more dwellings, but excluding power supplies to lifts";
• "in a building that receives its electricity from a source located within or shared with a dwelling"; or
• "in a garden or in or on land associated with a building where the electricity is from a source located within or shared with a dwelling".

The third and fourth limbs are the ones that surprise people. A detached garage, a workshop or a garden office fed from the house consumer unit is inside Part P, even though nobody lives in it. A commercial unit taking its supply from a flat above is too.

This is England. Wales publishes its own Approved Document P, and Scotland and Northern Ireland run separate building standards systems entirely. Do not carry an English notification decision across a border.

The three notifiable jobs

Notification is not in Part P. It is in regulation 12(6A) of the Building Regulations 2010, which requires a building notice or an application for building control approval with full plans where the work consists of:

(a) the installation of a new circuit; (b) the replacement of a consumer unit; or (c) any addition or alteration to existing circuits in a special location.

Three items. That is the complete list for a dwelling.

Special location is the term doing the quiet work in (c). In Approved Document P it means, in essence, space around a bath or shower, and space around a swimming or paddling pool or sauna heater. A new socket in a bedroom is an addition to an existing circuit and is not notifiable. The same socket, in the zone around a bath, is.

Everything not on the list is non-notifiable. Non-notifiable does not mean unregulated: requirement P1 still applies, the installation still has to be designed, installed, inspected and tested, and the customer still needs certification. It only means building control does not have to be told.

The three routes to signing it off

Once work is notifiable, there are three lawful ways to deal with it.

1. Self-certification. If you are registered with a scheme named in Schedule 3 to the Building Regulations 2010, you certify the work yourself and the scheme notifies the local authority on your behalf. Schedule 3, paragraph 8 covers "installation of fixed low or extra-low voltage electrical installations in dwellings" and names the bodies whose registered installers may do this: Blue Flame Certification Limited, Certsure LLP, NAPIT Registration Limited and Oil Firing Technical Association Limited. Certsure LLP is the body behind the NICEIC and ELECSA brands.

Paragraph 9 covers a narrower case that adds a lot of trades to the list: electrical installation "as a necessary adjunct to or arising out of other work being carried out by the registered person". A registered heating engineer wiring in the boiler they have just fitted is in paragraph 9, not paragraph 8.

That scheme registration is also doing double duty: it is how whoever engages you satisfies the general competence-checking duty every dutyholder now carries under Part 2A of the same Regulations — see competence is a legal duty on every building job in England.

2. Building control. Give a building notice or make a full plans application before the work starts, and the local authority or an approved inspector deals with inspection and the completion certificate. This is the route for an unregistered installer and for a competent DIY householder.

3. Third-party certification. Have the work inspected and certified by a registered third party. This is the fallback when work has already been done without notification, and it is the more expensive of the three by a distance.

The commercial gap between route 1 and route 3 is the whole argument for scheme registration. It is not about competence; it is about who is allowed to notify.

What the customer actually gets

Notification and certification are separate deliverables and customers confuse them constantly.

• The electrical installation certificate (or minor works certificate) is yours, issued under BS 7671. It says the work is safe and records the test results.
• The building regulations compliance certificate comes from your scheme provider or from building control. It says the work was notified and accepted.

A house sale will ask for the second one. If you self-certify, it arrives from the scheme, usually a few weeks later, and it goes to the address of the work. Tell the customer that, or they will ring you in month three convinced nothing happened.

Keeping those two documents attached to the same job, alongside the invoice that carries a different VAT rate on almost every line, is the part that outgrows a folder structure first — the shape of that problem is in the four VAT positions one UK dwelling can carry.

Rented property: the five-year rule

If you inspect and test for landlords in England, a second instrument sits on top of Part P. The Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020, SI 2020/312 require, in regulation 3, that every electrical installation in the residential premises is "inspected and tested at regular intervals by a qualified person", and regulation 3(2) sets those intervals at "no more than 5 years".

Three further duties follow, and they are all deadlines:

The regulations applied to new tenancies from 1 July 2020 and to existing tenancies from 1 April 2021.

For an electrician this changes the shape of the work: an EICR for a landlord is not a one-off report but the start of a 28-day clock. Coding a C1 or C2 and then waiting three weeks for the landlord to think about it puts your customer in breach, not you — but it is your report that started the clock, and saying so in writing at the time is worth more than saying it afterwards.

A short checklist

1. Decide notifiability from regulation 12(6A), not from habit. New circuit, consumer unit, special location. Nothing else.
2. Check where the supply comes from before deciding Part P does not apply to an outbuilding.
3. If you self-certify, check which Schedule 3 paragraph you are registered under. Paragraph 8 and paragraph 9 are different permissions.
4. Issue the BS 7671 certificate at handover, and tell the customer the compliance certificate follows separately.
5. On landlord EICRs, put the 28-day remedial deadline in the covering note. It is regulation 3(4), not your opinion.

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Position as at 29 August 2026. This article describes the law in England and is not legal or technical advice. Approved Document P is guidance, not law: it shows one way of meeting requirement P1, and other ways can be acceptable. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate systems.

What Zirko does here: it keeps the job, the property and the documents you issued together, so that a certificate raised on a bathroom rewire two years ago is found by address rather than by memory. Zirko does not notify building control and does not issue BS 7671 certificates — those come from your scheme provider and your test software.