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It's a safety issue not a scheme to improve electricians income or support professional bodies. Plenty of slum landlords had been letting their tenants live with dangerous wiring.
The fire service were right to insist on changing back to metal boxes, it was a big proportion of household fires starting from arcing in plastic boxes and people store all kinds of flammable materials under the stairs, so yes it was stopping people being able to get down the stairs to safety. The term for the test is EICR (Electrical Installation Condition Report), the certificate can be referred to as a NICEIC.
You do not have to change the consumer unit in every case. Here's an explainer :- https://youtu.be/08HJtW5ZwsY
There is no reason why NAPIT registered electricians should be cheaper than NICEIC and the difference in price for registration is not that big when you factor it over a year.
Airhead-
yeah, I was a bit careless with my language there. It's a pretty sensible move to require them for rented properties, and I think more people should get them when buying houses too. It's the creep on the requirements I'm slightly less convinced about - I think it's easy for a committee to make new requirements which do increase safety, but it seems like relatively small gains from a pretty high baseline. But maybe I'm just being grumpy because I'm having to spend so much :)
And yes, I agree about plastic consumer units too :) I just don't think they should have been given more time to continue selling them....
In our case we ended up replacing them, in one case as we were running out of space in it once we'd put in the different type RCDs/SPDs that were required, and in another case because the manufacturer is no longer around and we can't get the right bits for it.
jdsnape
I've come to the view that it is partly an improvement, and partly a scheme to keep the professional bodies going. The electrician said they were now being made to install surge protectors, which are a one-time thing, and they've never been called out to replace them so the odds of a surge must be pretty minimal.
The thing that wound me up was reading that the fire service convinced the government to force consumer units to be made of metal rather than plastic because there had been too many fires where it hadn't been contained - and consumer units tend to be by the stairs/on a means of escape. The industry then moaned that they had a huge stock of plastic units and got an extension to use them up - which now means when people get the NICEIC done for renting or whatever they get made to install a metal one.
BTW, one tip for saving money is that you may not have to have the test done by a NIC registered electrician-there are other bodies (like NAPIT) which are cheaper to join so the tests end up being a bit cheaper, but are equivalent.