Member

Amendment 227, also tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Best, would enable regulations to be made to require authorised providers of gas safety records and electrical installation condition reports to upload them on to the database. We appreciate the importance of the role of the database as a source of compliance information. We intend that landlords should upload gas and electrical safety records to demonstrate compliance with these important safety regulations. However, the amendment relies on the digitisation of gas and electricity regulations, which is beyond the scope of this legislation. Gas and electrical safety records currently exist across tenure and beyond England. Any consideration of digitising these records would require careful consideration of the needs and capacity of a wide range of user groups. While there are no immediate plans to digitise gas and electrical safety certificates, the database will be built in such a way that it has the capability to draw upon datasets if they become digitised in the future. Including this amendment would risk delays to the implementation of the database, and I therefore respectfully ask the noble Lord not to press it.