Part P explained: what you can legally do yourself

• Applies to homes in England and Wales
• New circuits, fuse box changes and bathroom work are notifiable
• Like-for-like replacements are not notifiable
• Unnotified work can hold up a house sale

What Part P is

Part P is the section of the Building Regulations for England that deals with electrical safety in homes. It has been in force since 2005, and the current guidance is Approved Document P, 2013 edition. Its single legal requirement is short: electrical work in a dwelling must be designed and installed so that it protects people from fire and electric shock. The document then explains how to show you have met that requirement, which in practice means working to the wiring regulations, BS 7671:2018+A2:2022, and having certain jobs checked and recorded.

Part P applies to houses, flats, and the gardens, sheds and outbuildings that go with them, whether the work is done by an electrician or by you. Shops, offices and factories have their own rules.

People ask for Part P building regulations explained because they have been told something is “Part P” and are not sure if that means they are allowed to do it. Part P does not ban anyone from doing anything. It says certain jobs must be notified and signed off, and all jobs must be done safely. Those are two different things, and this guide takes them one at a time.

Notifiable vs non-notifiable work

Notifiable work is work that the council’s building control department must be told about, and that must be inspected and recorded as complying with the regulations. In England there are three categories.

The first is a new circuit. Running a new cable from the consumer unit, the fuse box, to anything at all is notifiable: a new cooker circuit, an electric shower, a garden supply, an EV charger, a hot tub.

The second is replacing the consumer unit itself.

The third is any work, including small jobs, in what the regulations call a special location. In a home that means the area around a bath or shower, within the zones the wiring regulations define, and rooms containing a swimming pool or sauna. The reason is simple: water and electricity together need extra care.

Everything else is non-notifiable. That includes replacing a damaged socket, switch or light fitting with a similar one, adding a socket or a fused spur to an existing circuit in an ordinary room, replacing a short length of damaged cable like for like, and fitting new downlights on an existing lighting circuit. Non-notifiable does not mean unregulated. The work still has to meet BS 7671 and still has to be safe. It just does not need to be reported.

Wales kept the older, longer list of notifiable work when England shortened it in 2013, so in Wales a new socket in a kitchen or outdoors is still notifiable. Scotland does not use Part P at all and works under its own building standards. The rest of this guide is about England.

What you can usually do yourself

Legally, a homeowner in England can do the non-notifiable jobs without telling anyone. You can swap a cracked socket faceplate for a new one, change a light switch, replace a pendant with a new fitting, or add a socket to the ring in the living room.

I am not going to be preachy about this. Plenty of people are capable of changing a socket. But in twenty years of opening up other people’s work I have seen what goes wrong, and it is rarely the job they thought was hard. It is the earth wire left unconnected because the old fitting did not have one. It is the spur taken off a spur. It is the socket added to what turned out to be the cooker circuit. It is the junction box buried in a wall with no way to get to it. None of these looks wrong when the lights come on. All of them turn up on an EICR years later, sometimes as a C2, and sometimes after a fire.

So the practical rule we give customers is this. If you cannot prove the power is off with a tester, not just the switch, do not start. If you do not know what every wire in the box is for, do not start. If the job is in a bathroom, outdoors, or involves the consumer unit, it is notifiable anyway, so get an electrician. And never take covers off the fuse box; the incoming side is live even with the main switch off.

Nothing on this page is a set of instructions. It is a description of where the line falls.

How notifiable work gets signed off

There are two routes.

The first is the one almost everyone uses. The work is done by an electrician who belongs to a competent person scheme. The schemes are run by bodies the government has authorised, NICEIC and NAPIT being the ones you will see most often on the Fylde coast, and they assess their members’ work every year. The scheme member does the job, tests it, issues an Electrical Installation Certificate, and notifies the scheme. The scheme tells the council and sends you a Building Regulations Compliance Certificate. You do nothing except keep the paperwork.

The second route is for anyone who is not a scheme member, including a homeowner doing their own notifiable work. Before the work starts, you submit a building notice to the council and pay a fee. Building control then inspects the work, which may mean a visit during the job as well as after, and many councils will ask you to arrange a test by a qualified electrician at your own cost before they issue a completion certificate. Between the fee and the testing, this route usually costs more than hiring a scheme member in the first place, which is why very few people use it.

Having a scheme member certify someone else’s finished work is not a route. They can only notify work they did themselves. If a job has already been done without notification, the only option left is the council, which treats it as a regularisation application and charges more again.

Why it matters when you sell or insure

This is where unnotified work comes back. When you sell a house in England, the property information form your solicitor fills in asks whether any electrical work has been done since 2005 and whether you have the certificates. If you say yes to the work and no to the certificates, the buyer’s solicitor will ask questions, and the usual outcomes are a price reduction, an indemnity policy you pay for, or a demand for an EICR before exchange. We get called in for a lot of those EICRs, often at short notice, often on a Friday.

Insurance is less visible but can be worse. If there is a fire and the loss adjuster traces it to a circuit that was added without certification, the insurer has grounds to question the claim. Whether they use them depends on the insurer and the policy, but the certificate removes the argument.

Landlords have the extra layer of the five-year EICR, and unnotified work shows up on it. A new circuit with no certificate is often the thing that turns a satisfactory report into an unsatisfactory one.

If in doubt

If you are not sure whether a job is notifiable, treat it as if it is. If you are not sure whether you can do a job safely, you cannot, and that is not an insult, it is how electricity works. Ask an electrician before you start rather than after; we would far rather spend five minutes on the phone telling you a socket swap is fine than spend a day tracing a fault you did not know you had made.

Keep every certificate you are given, and ask for one if it does not arrive. An Electrical Installation Certificate or a Minor Electrical Installation Works Certificate should follow every job, and the Building Regulations Compliance Certificate should follow every notifiable one within a few weeks. If a trader will not provide them, ask why.

Need a hand?

If you have a job that is notifiable, or an old one that was never signed off, our consumer unit upgrades and fault finding pages cover the two jobs this comes up on most. For anything else, get in touch and we will tell you straight whether it needs us or not.