Partner Article

Don’t pay for PAT Testing in the second year

That’s right; don’t pay for PAT testing in the second year; in fact, if you’re office-based then you shouldn’t get any PAT Testing done in the second year (the majority of office-based businesses fit into this category).

You see, offices are considered ‘low risk’ and in being so they don’t need the electrical appliances testing every year, in fact, every year is just a waste of money.

Not used to hearing the PAT tester say that? Well, if you think about it - it’s a waste of your money and a waste of our time as the chances of something happening in that time are so low, and if it did chances are someone would spot it before we got there.

“unnecessary electrical safety tests cost office-based businesses an estimated £30 million a year“

It’s our aim that when the HSE release their next statement it’s a much lower figure as we will be reducing some of these costs with our clients.

The HSE Chair Judith Hacket said “we know that low-risk companies are being mis-led over what the law requires when it comes to maintaining portable electrical appliances, and many are paying for testing that is not needed*. Businesses are responsible for protecting their employees, but they shouldn’t be wasting their money on unnecessary checks that have no real benefit“

*this refers to office-based businesses getting PAT tested annually when the chances of a fault occuring that year are so small

Many offices out there let the PAT company come back year on year without really assessing if it’s necessary. Right now you’re probably doing a risk assessment for a chair, some ladders or a trip hazard but when was the last time you did an RA for your electrics? Baring in mind there’s a much bigger chance the electrics will kill someone than an office chair.

If you did so you may find that you don’t need to test everything annually; you may find that every 2 or even 4 years would be sufficient, or that some appliances should be done every 6 months but the rest every 4 years - there are many different options but everyone will lead to the ultimate goals:

• save you money
• reduce time disruption
• improve productivity

Here’s an example:

We’ve recently completed a contract in a large contact centre; over 10,000 items - a contract we have recently secured. In the past they have been working with another company testing everything every year which wasn’t cost effective. This was our first year on the site; Our prior risk assessment and client meetings determined that we could reduce the frequency to every 2 years; effectively halving the client’s costs.

In addition to that, the work by the previous company was done during the working day, and took their team 5 days; this meant lots of disruption for staff as they needed to shut down computers for the work to happen. This lost the company money and disrupted the staff.

We agreed to put a bigger team on the job (so it takes less time), do it overnight when there were no staff on site so we weren’t disrupting them (even the small cost of security didn’t put the client off), which meant productivity wasn’t effected.

The final outcome was we halved the customers costs on the PAT testing whilst they performed better than the same period last year.

We can do the same for you; with a risk assessment of your premises we can determine the true frequency requirements for your portable appliance testing, from which we can save you money.

The other benefit to you is you’re not having to search for a cheap company in order to save money; we have many new clients who are actually paying more per item with us but still saving considerable amounts of money - we’re providing a high standard of service, worthy of our costs.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Richard Ayre .