I'd love to hear the rest of the story. Ditto above. Like so many services, you never know what you are going to get. You could hire a lawyer who is pants/brilliant. Same qualificiations/experience but just not the same intelligence and honesty. I think the key factor is a person who is diligent and conscientious. Perhaps the way forward is to make it clear from the start, you will not be using the same electrician for remedial work, you will be using some other firm/electrician to put right any defects found. This is a growing trend for LLs to separate the two functions. Obviously there is a conflict of interests. Same with an MOT, again you need an honest and conscientious mechanic to ensure you will not be charged for unnecessary work.
Here is the full story. I have called the company ‘Noname’ but many Londoners would be able to guess who they are. When I go to the journalists and consumer champions with this, I will be naming names. I have reported them to Trading Standards and Westminster Building Control.
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I have recently had an experience with an electrician who was not fully qualified in the UK, and who was sent out by a maintenance firm who are NICEIC Affiliated. The work carried out did not resolve the cause of the problem and resulted in unnecessary and unprofessional results. I then needed the NICEIC to mediate.
The maintenance firm I used is Noname. They appear to rely on emergency callouts and charge £88 per hour plus VAT. In my case, they created unnecessary work and therefore additional hours for themselves.
I had the unfortunate experience of dealing with them when my tenant rang them on an emergency callout to my London flat because a circuit kept tripping and the boiler did not work.
Noname sent a charming young Australian ‘electrician’, who turned out to be unqualified in the UK. This gentleman spent some considerable time attempting to diagnose the problem and came up with a solution that not only failed to identify the cause of the problem, it then created hours of unnecessary work.
It turned out that the boiler, having been serviced only two weeks previously, had developed a loose electrical connection. This is something that a competent and qualified electrician should have been able to identify and fix in ten minutes. However, this Australian ‘electrician’ embarked on an elaborate new wiring scheme instead.
As you may know, responsible landlords (I am one, although I only rent out one property) are legally obliged to ensure our electrics are safe and up to date and now there is a requirement for an EICR, a report that checks your electrical installation to give your tenants peace of mind. So, since this ‘electrician’ was there anyway, I asked him to do an EICR, not realising that he was unqualified.
The office at Noname was friendly and helpful and took a card payment of £312 for the EICR. The Australian said he would carry out the report inspection before he did the wiring work to sort out the circuit (which seemed a bit odd to me, but he was most convincing).
I was unable to visit my property as I was abroad, but, by the end of the day, I had been charged £312 for the EICR report on my card and my tenant was asked to pay £501 on his. At the end of day two, the Australian demanded a further £698 which I refused to pay until I had seen the invoice. He signed off his own work and left my tenants without central heating and with a replacement wall socket which used to work but now didn’t.
So, almost £1200 later, not including the price of the EICR, the Australian hadn’t fixed the problem and he had created a new one.
I was already beginning to smell a rat and I started to ask questions. It turned out the Australian had some vague Australian qualifications which, despite my request, Noname did not send me. It appears that this gentleman had done a three-day City & Guilds course in the UK. He had only been in the UK since August 2020.
The Australian had messed up my electrical installation AFTER having done the EICR, so the report was never going to be worth the paper it was written on. The trunking he installed was about as incongruous as it could possibly be.
The EICR Report turned up a few days later. It was frightening how ‘potentially dangerous’ my electrical installation was. It was full of C2 codes. According to the Australian, I needed a new consumer unit. As soon as I could get to my property (the November lockdown had intervened), I had another, independent and fully qualified electrician check the report (not an NICEIC electrician). The C2 codes turned out to be unnecessary. My electrical installation was absolutely fine as I had had it upgraded a few years ago. There was nothing unsafe about it and all that was needed was for me to upgrade some bathroom lights.
However, none of this was before I had turned to the NICEIC. I had spent time filling out their complaints form. They said they would not be involved in the financial side of any dispute. They were only interested in getting the problem solved. I asked them for an independent check on my system. They replied only that I MUST have the contractor back who did the work so it could be remedied by them. Also, I MUST NOT change the work in any way. They point blank refused to mediate.
The NICEIC did, however, concede that there were ‘issues’ with the EICR Report but, again, suggested I had the contractor back to remedy them.
I could not agree to expose myself to further incompetence, dishonesty and outrageous prices. Noname had taken £501 from my former tenant and formally invoiced him for £637.20, which he of course refuses to pay and so do I. Noname is pursuing my tenant relentlessly. Fortunately for the tenant, he was on secondment in the UK and is no longer in the country. So instead, Noname are threatening me with legal action for an invoice which is not in my name. I am trying to get my money back from them for the invalid EICR and they are refusing to refund me.
It also turned out that the Australian’s elaborate wiring scheme was illegal. This was confirmed when an independent electrician, affiliated to a different professional trade association, came to look at the problem. He was astonished that the NICEIC were treating this case so lightly.
This is a sad state of affairs. We need to be confident that electricians, whether working on their own account or for general maintenance companies, are qualified and competent.
We are talking ELECTRICS here. They can be dangerous. Has Grenfell Tower taught us nothing?
My recommendation:
Think twice before using NICEIC affiliated electricians and if you do, ensure you check their qualifications thoroughly.
The NICEIC appear to be only interested in taking subscriptions. They seem to be disinterested in the quality of the workmanship of their members, nor for the safety of the general public. If my case is typical, it appears that NICEIC members may be unqualified and member companies are apparently able to send out unqualified operatives.
My further recommendation is not to trust Noname’good reviews on Trustpilot. On examination, the positive ones seem to have been written by the same person.
