AAn inspection is a reading of a unit, written down the same way every time
The visit is not a search for faults. It is a reading of the unit against the last reading of it, so the two can be compared by somebody holding both. That is only possible if the same things are looked at in the same order and written in the same words, so the office works from a fixed sheet and fills every line, including the lines where there is nothing to say.
Where something is found that needs work, the visit raises a repair report under its own reference rather than being written up as a repair. The inspection record then carries that reference, and the two files point at each other.
- Looked at inside
- Room by room: windows and their locks, doors and frames, floors, visible pipework and taps, the state of decoration, signs of damp or water where visible, smoke alarms present and sounding when tested.
- Looked at outside
- The entrance door and its lock, the meter cupboard, gutters and downpipes from the ground, the state of paths and steps, boundary fencing, and the bin store where there is one.
- Written either way
- Each line is completed whether or not anything was found. A blank line is indistinguishable from a line nobody looked at.
BThe cycle is a figure the office is given, not one it publishes
Units come round for inspection on a cycle counted in whole months from the date of the last recorded visit. That figure sits on the instruction this office holds and is not reproduced on this site, because a number published here would be read as a commitment and could be out of date within a week of being written.
What the office can show is the arithmetic. Sheet B below adds a cycle in months to a last-inspection date, pulls the day back where the target month is shorter, and says whether the result lands inside the return window now open or in a later one. Type in the cycle you hold and it counts with that.
Sheet B is worked in the browser. By hand: take the month of the last visit, add the cycle in whole months, carry twelve months into a year, then keep the same day of the month — pulling it back to the last day where the new month is shorter. Compare the result against the quarter now open to see which register it belongs on.
CWhat the inspection record contains when it is filed
A record that cannot be dated, placed and attributed is not evidence of anything, so four lines are completed before the sheet is filed, and the sheet is filed the same day as the visit rather than at the end of the week.
- Date and time
- When the visit began and when it ended. A two-minute visit and a forty-minute visit are different events.
- Who was present
- The officer who attended, and whether a member of the household was in. Not who they are — that they were there.
- What was read
- Every line of the sheet, completed. Alarms recorded as tested or not tested, never left blank.
- What was raised
- The reference of any repair report raised from the visit, and the lane it went into.
DNo access is a result, and it is written as one
A unit that fell due and was not inspected goes on the quarter’s register with the reason beside it, not off the register. The reason is specific: the appointment letter and the date it was sent, the second date offered, whether anybody answered, what was left at the door. A card through the letterbox is recorded because it is the only evidence the visit happened at all.
Those lines are also carried on the access and no-access return, filed behind whichever return the visit belonged to, so that a gap on the register has its explanation on the page after it. The register is meant to read as a complete list of units due, not a list of visits that worked.
Nothing on this page states an inspection cycle, a frequency or a deadline. Sheet B counts only with the figure typed into it, and the figure is yours.