Certificates & safety
What is a landlord's gas safety duty?
A landlord must ensure gas appliances, fittings and flues in a rented property are maintained in a safe condition and checked by a Gas Safe registered engineer, with the record given to the tenant.
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<img src="https://propertyoptix.co.uk/glossary/landlord-gas-safety-duty/diagram.svg" alt="landlord gas safety duty — diagram from PropertyOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://propertyoptix.co.uk/glossary/landlord-gas-safety-duty">What is a landlord's gas safety duty?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://propertyoptix.co.uk">PropertyOptix</a>
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</figure>There are three strands: maintenance, the periodic check, and giving the record to tenants. They are separate duties and a landlord can meet one while breaching another.
Access is the practical difficulty, and refusal by a tenant does not remove the duty. What is expected is evidence of reasonable, repeated and documented attempts to gain access.
It applies to appliances the landlord provides. Appliances the tenant owns are outside the check but the flues and pipework serving them may not be, which is a distinction worth establishing rather than assuming.
What goes wrong in practice
- Access refused and the matter dropped, with no record of attempts.
- Check completed but the record never given to the tenant.
- Tenant-owned appliances assumed to take the associated flue out of scope.