What should you do if you've lost a gas safety certificate?

Losing a gas safety certificate is common and usually easy to fix. The record is not only held by you: the engineer or company that carried out the check keeps their own copy, so the first move is simply to ask them for another. The harder question is why it went missing, because a filing system that lost one certificate will lose the next one too.

Who else holds a copy of the record?

Almost always the engineer or firm that did the check. Their copy is a business record: it is how they answer queries about the job, and for the self-employed HMRC expects business records to be kept for years, so most engineers keep job paperwork long after the visit. If a letting agent manages the property, the agency should hold a copy too, since delivering and filing the record is a standard part of full management. And if the certificate was ever emailed, it is still sitting in an inbox somewhere. Between those three, a genuinely unrecoverable certificate is rare.

How do you get a replacement copy?

Does a lost certificate put you in breach?

Losing the paper does not undo the check, but the duty under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 is to keep each record for at least two years and to be able to give tenants their copies, so you do need to restore the file rather than shrug. Where it bites is timing. If the certificate goes missing at the moment someone asks for it, a tenant, a council officer, an HMO licensing renewal, a buyer's solicitor during a sale, the gap looks the same as non-compliance until you close it. Chase the copy the day you notice, not the day it is demanded.

When is a fresh check the better answer?

When the record and the renewal date are both lost. A certificate you cannot find and cannot date leaves you unable to prove the property is in compliance or to know when it falls out of it, and the cost of a new check is small against that uncertainty. It is also the honest fix when the check may simply never have happened, which does occur with inherited properties and informal arrangements. Only a Gas Safe registered engineer can carry out the check, so book one, get the new record, and start the file cleanly from there.

How do you stop certificates going missing again?

Take the filing away from paper and memory. HSE accepts electronically stored records provided they can be reproduced when required, are secure, and identify the engineer, which makes a digital archive the obvious home for every certificate you hold. Engineers using Manifold have every CP12 they have ever issued stored against the job, reissuable in seconds when a landlord rings, and landlords on the portal see their current and past certificates without asking anyone. The phrase this replaces is the one every engineer knows: can you send that record over again. Nobody misses it.