EICR has thrown a complete spanner in the works?

Can anyone help? We have 10 properties all currently let and very few issues – life good right?

Along comes the EICR legislation and throws a complete spanner in the works. We have used the same Electrician for a number of years and trusted him completely, he’s never let us down before but its almost like he thinks we have an open cheque book when it comes to these reports.

We have been charged £150 per report and the quotes to correct just the C1 and C2’s are in the thousands. I discussed correcting the C1 and C2’s only for now and putting the C3’s on a rolling programme throughout the year and suddenly what he told me verbally was a C3 is now a C2 on the report and needs fixing now.

It didn’t feel right, so I consulted a new Electrician (at a cost of £120 per report) and the quotes are HALF the cost of the original Electrician. He confirms that a lot of the C2’s on the reports are actually C3’s and some of the C2’s don’t even exist. One of these is a core showing on a light pendant which turned out to be DIRT, and would have cost me £40 to replace had the original Electrician been tasked with the work.

Is there any recourse for landlords who are being taken for a ride by Electricians – surely this is fraudulent? Do I just have to suck it up and chalk it up to experience?

Julie