Insights · Social housing
28,528 electrical safety inspections missed their deadline last year.
The Scottish Housing Regulator has published the first results from its new electrical safety indicator on 31 August 2026. Annual Assurance Statements are due on 31 October. This is what the numbers say, what they do not say, and what is worth doing in the six weeks between.
Most of the missed inspections are in council housing
Across Scottish social landlords in 2025-26, there were 28,528 instances of an Electrical Installation Condition Report not carried out within the required five years. A total of 110 landlords reported at least one. The range runs from a single missed inspection to 6,531 at one landlord.
Of those 28,528, some 24,920 were in local authority homes. That is about 87% of the total in council stock, with the remainder across registered social landlords. It is the first time this has been visible at all, because the indicator is new.
Over the same year, 90% of social homes met the Scottish Housing Quality Standard, up from 87%, and the proportion of homes in abeyance fell from 2.3% to 2.1%. The direction of travel on housing quality is upward. The electrical inspection figure is not a reversal of that; it is a measurement that did not exist before.
The indicator is a count, not a judgement
It is worth being precise about what this number is, because it is about to be written about loosely.
The indicator records instances where the five-year anniversary of an EICR passed without a new one. That is all it records. The figure itself is an indicator, not a penalty or enforcement notice. A landlord appearing in the figures has not, simply by virtue of that number, been sanctioned by the Regulator. But the underlying missed inspections can represent a compliance issue, and the Regulator is actively engaging with landlords where the scale or progress of outstanding work gives cause for concern.
What has changed is visibility. A number that used to sit in a landlord's own compliance reporting is now published, landlord by landlord, alongside a comparison tool. Local press has already started reporting it one organisation at a time: Stirling Council's figure of 2,391 was in the news on 2 September.
So the exposure is both reputational and regulatory — although the published figure itself is not a sanction.
Access was the reason most landlords gave — and the Regulator's answer was that it does not discharge the duty
Landlords commenting on their figures pointed mainly at access. Some of the properties were void, awaiting disposal, demolition or refurbishment, with inspections to be completed before re-letting. Most of the rest came down to not being able to get into an occupied home.
The Regulator's response in the report was that landlords remain responsible for having robust arrangements in place to achieve compliance as quickly as possible.
That is the sentence worth sitting with. Access is a genuine difficulty and everyone delivering this work knows it. It is also, in the Regulator's reading, a delivery problem to be solved rather than a circumstance to be reported. Which makes the interesting question not how many were missed, but what the arrangements are for the ones that are hard to reach — and whether they are the same properties every cycle.
A signed emergency lighting certificate says the fittings work, not that the route is lit
One adjacent point, because it tends to surface in the same conversation.
A standard emergency lighting test confirms that the fittings come on and stay on for their rated duration. That is the right test, and it is the one the certificate typically covers. It does not, on its own, demonstrate how much light reaches the floor along an escape route, which is what fire safety guidance is concerned with.
BS 5266-1:2025 places more explicit emphasis on verifying that installed emergency lighting achieves the required photometric performance, not only that the fittings function. The practical implication is that a passing functional test and a photometric verification are not the same thing. If your emergency lighting testing and your electrical inspection are bought together, it is worth checking which of the two questions your current certificate answers.
Four things worth doing before 31 October
None of these needs a contractor.
- 01
Know your own figure before you assure against it.
It is published. Read it, and read the comparison alongside landlords of a similar size and stock type rather than the national total.
- 02
Separate the causes.
Voids awaiting disposal, appointments that were never confirmed, and homes where access was genuinely refused are three different problems with three different fixes, and they are usually reported as one.
- 03
Check whether they are the same properties each cycle.
A persistent list is a different management task from a scattered one, and it is the single most useful thing to know before next year.
- 04
Record the arrangements, not just the outcome.
An Annual Assurance Statement is about whether a landlord has assured itself that its arrangements are sound. A figure with a described arrangement behind it reads very differently from a figure on its own.
What EGG Lighting does here
We deliver periodic electrical inspection and testing to BS 7671 and emergency lighting compliance to BS 5266-1:2025 for Scottish landlords, along with lighting surveys and asset records. On our largest programme we run the tenant appointments, the missed appointments and the rescheduling ourselves, rather than passing them back to the landlord's housing officers, because that is the part that decides whether a programme completes.
If you want to talk that through, the contact form reaches a person and we will tell you honestly what we can take on and when.
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