Notifiable electrical work: Part P in England, building warrants in Scotland

Ask an electrician what's notifiable and you'll usually get the same three things: new circuit, consumer unit, bathroom.

That answer is right in England. It's wrong in Wales, where the list is wider and older. And in Scotland the question doesn't really apply, because Scotland has no notification regime at all — which is exactly why so much of what's written online about "reporting electrical work to Building Standards" in Scotland is English law with the names changed.

Here's what each nation actually asks of you.

England: three things, and only three

Part P of the Building Regulations sets the duty — reasonable provision in design and installation to protect people from fire or injury — and it applies to dwellings, their common parts, and gardens or outbuildings fed from a dwelling.

What has to be notified is much narrower, and has been since 2013. Regulation 12(6A) lists it:

• installing a new circuit
• replacing a consumer unit
• any addition or alteration to an existing circuit in a special location

A special location is defined tightly: the zone around a bath tap or shower head — 2.25 metres up, and 0.6 metres out from the edge of a bath or shower tray — or a room containing a swimming pool or sauna heater.

A kitchen is not a special location in England. It was before 2013. It still is in Wales. That single line is behind more cross-border confusion than anything else in this subject.

Everything else is outside the notification rules: additions and alterations outside a special location, and replacements, repairs and maintenance anywhere. Approved Document P says so in terms.

Not notifiable is not the same as not regulated, though. Part P still applies, the work should still be designed, installed, inspected and tested to BS 7671, and local authorities can take enforcement action against non-notifiable work they find to be unsafe.

The three routes, and the two certificates

For work that is notifiable, there are three ways to comply.

Self-certification by a registered competent person. You do the work, issue the BS 7671 certificate, and within 30 days you or your scheme give the occupier a Building Regulations compliance certificate and tell building control. The schemes authorised for this are named in Schedule 3 to the regulations — currently Blue Flame, Certsure, NAPIT and OFTEC for electrical work in dwellings.

Third-party certification. An installer who isn't registered appoints a registered third-party certifier before work begins, then notifies them within five days of finishing. Worth knowing before you plan around it: only one operator is currently listed for this in Schedule 3A, so it is a much narrower route than the phrase suggests.

Building control. Notify before work begins; they decide how much inspecting and testing to do and issue a completion certificate at the end. If you're competent and supply your own BS 7671 certificate, the charge should reflect the reduced inspection work.

Two documents come out of this and they are not the same thing. The BS 7671 certificate is yours, and records that the installation was designed, inspected and tested. The Building Regulations compliance certificate comes from the scheme, and records compliance with the building regulations. What to keep and who gets a copy covers both.

What building control costs is set by each council, within a cost-recovery duty, so there's no national figure. When I checked published 2026 fee schedules the spread for comparable electrical notification ran from about £122 to £601. One council adds £218 where the work wasn't certified by a scheme-registered installer, because it has to pay a contractor to test it. Check your own council's published scheme rather than a number from a forum.

When it wasn't notified

This comes up constantly, usually as: can I just certify it now?

No. All three routes above are fixed before or at the time of the work — the competent-person route runs on a 30-day clock from completion, and the other two require something to happen before work begins. Once that's gone, scheme membership doesn't reopen it.

What's left is regularisation, under regulation 18. Three things about it are worth knowing:

• The owner applies, not you. The regularisation charge is the owner's too.
• Only the local authority can do it. A registered building control approver can't.
• It can mean opening the work up. The authority may require the work laid open for inspection, tests and samples before it will certify, and the certificate it issues is "evidence (but not conclusive evidence)" of compliance.

It's retrospective in a helpful way — the standard applied is the one in force when the work was done, not today's — and it only reaches work carried out on or after 11 November 1985. Councils commonly charge a premium: of the published schemes I looked at, one applies 50% on top, another 120% of the building notice charge, and a third states a 30% "penalty charge" in its own wording. Oddly, building notice charges carry VAT and regularisation charges don't, consistently across every council I checked.

The penalties changed in October 2023 and a lot of online guidance hasn't caught up. Contravening the building regulations is an offence under section 35 of the Building Act 1984, which as substituted carries an unlimited fine and up to two years' imprisonment. Section 35A, the old prosecution time limit, was repealed. And a section 36 enforcement notice — requiring work to be pulled out or altered — can now be served up to ten years after completion, where it used to be twelve months.

Note where each lands. The offence bites on whoever contravened, which on a notification failure is usually the installer. The enforcement notice is served on the owner, who can be made to pay for the council to put it right. Two different people carrying two different halves of the same problem.

One thing I could not establish: whether the schemes will accept a late notification shortly after the 30 days as an administrative matter. There's no published answer either way, so ask yours rather than assuming.

Wales: the list you learned in England is the wrong list

Wales has exactly the same Part P — it's one England-and-Wales text. What Wales never adopted is the 2013 narrowing. Regulation 12(6A) simply doesn't exist there.

So Wales still runs the original logic, which works the opposite way round: work is notifiable unless it's in the exempt list. In practice that means, alongside new circuits and consumer unit replacements:

• Kitchens count. Adding a socket or a lighting point to an existing circuit is notifiable in a kitchen.
• So does outdoors. Outdoor lighting and power are "special installations", and a socket on an external wall is notifiable.
• So does central heating control wiring, even where you've kept out of kitchens and bathrooms.
• There's no third-party certifier route. It's self-certify or tell building control.

Wales does have competent person schemes, with the same operators — Schedule 3 is a single England-and-Wales table.

One caveat if you go looking for the Welsh guidance: its Approved Document P is the 2006 edition, and its technical references are pinned to BS 7671:2001. The scope it describes is current. Its vocabulary is twenty years old.

Scotland: no notification, because it's a different machine

Scotland doesn't notify. It permits. A building warrant is granted before work starts, and a completion certificate goes back afterwards for a verifier to accept. There is no Scottish Part P, no notifiable-work list and no compliance certificate.

The question is therefore not "is this notifiable?" but "does this work need a warrant at all?" — and for most domestic electrical work, the answer is no.

Schedule 3 to the Building (Scotland) Regulations 2004 exempts "any work to or in a house" from needing a warrant, and the Scottish Government's own technical handbook gives electrical work as an example of what that covers. So a rewire or a board change in an ordinary house needs no warrant, and nothing goes to the council at all. The only paperwork is the BS 7671 certificate you give the customer.

That exemption has edges, and they matter:

• A flat or maisonette is not a "house". The regulations define a house as a dwelling divided from the rest of the building only vertically; flats and maisonettes are divided horizontally. Rewiring in a flat is outside the exemption.
• Height. A house with, or gaining, a storey more than 4.5 metres up falls outside it.
• Separating walls. Work adversely affecting one drops out — and the handbook's own example is installing recessed sockets.

None of this means the standards don't apply. Regulation 5 is explicit that exempt work must still meet the standards, and mandatory standard 4.5 requires an installation that doesn't threaten health and safety or become a source of fire. The handbook says it should be installed to BS 7671:2018 — a more current reference, as it happens, than England's Approved Document P manages.

Where a warrant is needed, certification works differently from England. An approved certifier of construction can certify the electrical installation, and the verifier must accept that certificate as conclusive of the facts in it. Two things to be precise about:

• It only applies to work that needs a warrant. mygov.scot says exactly that. There's no free-standing self-certification in Scotland.
• Approved certifier is not the same as being scheme-registered. It's a separate status, requiring employment by an approved body. Only two schemes operate it for electrical installations — SELECT and NICEIC.

And if warranted work was done without a warrant, Scotland is harsher than England on one point: a late application can be made any time before a completion certificate is accepted, but the standards applied are those in force when the certificate is submitted, not those of the day the work was done. Doing work without a required warrant is an offence carrying a fine of up to £5,000.

Northern Ireland, for completeness: its building regulations don't cover electrical installations at all, so there's no notification and no competent person scheme. Confusingly, Northern Ireland does have a "Part P" — it's about sanitary appliances and scalding.

Four things worth unlearning

• "Part P means only a registered electrician can do the work." It doesn't. An unregistered installer can do notifiable work; they just have to involve building control before starting.
• "If it's not notifiable, the regs don't apply." They do. Part P applies to all of it, and councils can enforce against unsafe non-notifiable work.
• "Scotland has no Part P, so nothing applies." Standard 4.5 applies, BS 7671 is the route to satisfying it, and doing warrant-required work without a warrant is a criminal offence.
• "New circuits and board changes in Scotland have to be reported to Building Standards." This one is on several trade sites and it's English law wearing a kilt. In an ordinary house there is nothing to report.

Where grafter.ly fits

Not here, mostly. grafter.ly isn't certificate software, it won't produce an EIC and it doesn't notify anybody — certificates belong in whatever cert app you already use.

The one place it touches this is on the paperwork around the job. A certificate, an invoice and a building-control notification are three separate documents, and none of them is evidence of the others — which is why it's worth putting the certificate reference on the invoice, so a customer looking at a bill in two years can find the certificate that went with it. Our invoice template for electricians has that built into it.

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Sources. England: the Building Regulations 2010 — Part P of Schedule 1, regulation 12 for what is notifiable and what counts as a special location, regulation 18 for regularisation, Schedule 3 and Schedule 3A for the authorised schemes, and Part 2A on dutyholders and competence; Approved Document P, 2013 edition; the Building Act 1984, section 35 and section 36; the Building (Local Authority Charges) Regulations 2010, regulation 3 and regulation 6; GOV.UK on building regulations approval and the current competent person schemes; and the published 2026 fee schedules of Dover, Sandwell, Richmond upon Thames, West Northamptonshire, Oxford and Hillingdon councils. Wales: the 2018 regulations that took the English changes back out, Schedule 4 as it stands for Wales, the Welsh Government's Approved Document P and its guidance on electrical work. Scotland: the Building (Scotland) Act 2003, sections 8, 17, 19 and 48; the Building (Scotland) Regulations 2004, regulation 5 and Schedule 3; the Domestic Technical Handbook, April 2026; mygov.scot on approved certification; and the Scottish Government's research on the regulation of electricians. Northern Ireland: the Building Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2012 and the Department of Finance's technical booklet list. All checked 23 September 2026.

None of the above is advice on a specific job. It's an account of three regimes that genuinely diverge, so check the one the work actually sits in.