Number of Electrical Installation Condition Reports carried on private sector rentals
Received 27 April 2026
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Electrical Safety First requests the following information regarding Electrical Installation Condition Reports (EICRs):
Local Authorities:
1.Please provide information on how many homes in your jurisdiction are classified as:
Private Rented Sector (PRS) properties.
2.Regarding the housing stock of PRS properties, please provide the following information:
a)The number of Electrical Information Condition Reports (EICRs) carried out in privately rented homes that have been submitted to you over the last four years.
b)The number of Classification Code C1 and Classification Code C2 observations recorded within any EICR, in the last four years, per year.
c)The number of remedial works carried out on these properties as a result of the EICR outcome.
Responded 30 April 2026
1.The number can be found here Live tables on dwelling stock (including vacants) - GOV.UK which states for 2024 the number in the PRS for ECDC was 5667. This closely equates to our last set of figures which were obtained through our own House Condition Survey of 2021, which identified 37,556 dwellings, with 72% being owner occupied, 15% private rented and 13% social rented. 15% equates to 5633 properties in the private rented sector.
2. Unfortunately, we are unable to answer this within the time scale allowed in FOI legislation. The information that you have requested is not held in an easily accessible format by the Council. We believe that it would take a considerable amount of time to extract and collate the information requested.
The council does not get sent EICR’s, unless we request them as part of an investigation, either due to a complaint of housing disrepair, as part of a HMO licence, as part of a HMO inspection, or as part of a schemes such as Homes for Ukraine. As this information is not recorded separately, we would need to review each individual case, in each of the subject areas, over the last 4 years to identify where an electrical concern was raised and / or an EICR may have been requested. We would then need to look through every document saved on that file to locate the EICR and then to check the detail of each one to identify if C1 or C2 fault.
This information is exempt from disclosure under Section 12(4)(b) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. In respect of those requests that are answered in full, partially or the total refused, please take this as notice under FOIA, that we:
a) Consider the information as exempt from disclosure under the Act.
b) Claim exempt under sections of the Act:
Section 12(4)(b) Manifestly Unreasonable
c) State why the exemption applies:
12(4) For the purposes of paragraph (1)(a), a public authority may refuse to disclose information to the extent that – (b) the request for information is manifestly unreasonable
Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 allows a public authority to refuse a request if the cost of providing the information to the applicant would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004: “12 Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit (1) Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit”.
The Regulations provide that the appropriate limit to be applied to requests received by local authorities is £450 (equivalent to 2.5 days of work). In estimating the cost of complying with a request for information, an authority can only take into account any reasonable costs incurred in:
“(a) determining whether it holds the information,
(b) locating the information, or a document which may contain the information,
(c) retrieving the information, or a document which may contain the information, and
(d) extracting the information from a document containing it”.
For the purposes of the estimate the costs of performing these activities should be estimated at a rate of £25 per hour.