Your inspection appointment

Why it’s important to keep your Gas Safe Register inspection appointment – and what could happen if you don’t.
This article appears in the September-October 2024 edition of the magazine.

When you are invited for your inspection, it’s important to keep your appointment: If you cancel or don’t attend, sanctions may be applied to your business, which could have an impact on you carrying out gas work legally.

Whether you’ve been invited to a standard work inspection, a virtual inspection event (VIE) or a more focused inspection that deals with applied competence or gas safety concerns raised by consumers, you’ll receive four to six weeks’ notice of the date and time.

Virtual Inspection Events are carried out online and hosted by a specially trained team of advisors and technical officers. They incorporate a pre-assessment briefing and an online knowledge-based technical assessment that is based on your registration work categories and unsafe situations.

You’ll usually be notified by email if that is your preferred communication method with the Register, and this will include details of the type of inspection.

Important: Check your email settings to make sure that communications from Gas Safe Register are not landing in your spam or junk folders.

Please keep your inspection appointment: cancellations are costly and cause inefficiencies for the Register. If you need to change your inspection appointment for a justified reason – such as sickness or a pre-booked holiday – please contact Gas Safe Register as soon as you can with your available dates.

Not allowing a work inspection without a justified reason is a breach of the Rules of Registration and will result in sanctions being applied to your business. Failure to attend a re-arranged appointment will result in sanctions being applied to your business.Gas Safe Register will apply a sanction if you do not attend your inspection and didn’t contact them before this.

How often can I expect to be inspected?
Gas Safe Register operates a risk-based inspection programme using a range of factors to profile the risk applied to businesses and individuals and determine the frequency of inspection. These factors include but are not limited to:

• The certification/awarding bodies used for qualifications
• Engineer demographic
• Previous inspection history, including any unsafe gas work accredited to the registration
• Any gas safety concern history
• Business size (number of employed engineers)
• Location of the business’s registered address or regional depot
• Gas safety qualifications and resultant work categories
• Scope of gas work undertaken, eg, domestic, commercial, etc
• Any pre-existing registration history.

The frequency of inspection can vary depending on these factors but most businesses will be inspected every two to three years.

For all new (probationary) registrations, a work inspection is mandatory within three months of joining the Register.

You can find out more about what to expect and how to prepare for your upcoming inspection here.

www.GasSafeRegister.co.uk/about-us/our-policies/