No law requires you to hire a registered electrician. What the law requires is that electrical work in a dwelling complies with the Building Regulations, and that certain categories of work are notified. Registration is the route that makes both of those cheap and automatic, which is why it is worth insisting on anyway.
What registration does
For work that has to be notified, a registered electrician certifies that the work complies with the Building Regulations and the scheme tells your local authority on your behalf. You get an Electrical Installation Certificate from the electrician and a Building Regulations Compliance Certificate from the scheme. No building control inspection, no separate fee, no arranging anything yourself.
Without registration, the same work still needs approval. Someone has to give a building notice or deposit full plans before work starts, pay the local authority a fee, and have the work inspected. That route is entirely lawful and it is slower and usually dearer.
There is a third route that few people use: a registered third-party certifier appointed before work begins, who inspects and certifies work carried out by someone unregistered.
The point is that registration is not a licence to do the work. It is a mechanism for proving the work complies without involving the council directly.
Only work in certain categories has to be notified
In England, notifiable work means installing a new circuit, replacing a consumer unit, or making any addition or alteration to existing circuits in a special location: the defined space around a bath or shower, or a room containing a swimming pool or sauna heater.
Adding a socket or light to an existing circuit outside those spaces is not notifiable. Nor is replacing a socket, switch or light fitting, or repair and maintenance work anywhere, including inside a bathroom.
The safety duty applies to every job regardless
This is the part that consumer content routinely mangles, so it is worth being precise. Approved Document P states that all electrical installation work carried out in a dwelling is subject to requirement P1, and should comply with the design and installation guidance in the document.
Requirement P1 reads: reasonable provision shall be made in the design and installation of electrical installations in order to protect persons operating, maintaining or altering the installations from fire or injury.
Non-notifiable work should still be designed, installed, inspected, tested and certificated in accordance with BS 7671, and a local authority can take enforcement action if non-notifiable work is found to be unsafe. Notifiability governs the paperwork. It does not create a category of work where the safety obligation is lower.
So "it does not need notifying" is never an answer to "does it need doing properly".
Which schemes still exist
The government authorises scheme operators, not consumer-facing brands, and this trips up a lot of published lists. NICEIC is a brand of Certsure LLP. You will not find NICEIC on the government list, because Certsure is what is listed.
For domestic electrical self-certification the operators that matter in practice are Certsure, trading as NICEIC, and NAPIT. BESCA, Blue Flame Certification and OFTEC are among the other operators authorised for the same dwellings category, so the point is not that their authorisation is narrower. It is one of practical domestic coverage: Certsure and NAPIT are the two a homeowner hiring an electrician will in practice encounter, which is why they are the two names worth knowing.
Two names that still appear on competitor comparison pages have been retired. ELECSA was retired as a brand by Certsure, with its registrations transferring to NICEIC from 26 April 2021 and the transfer completing in November 2022; elecsa.co.uk now redirects to niceic.com. STROMA closed its installer certification and merged it into NAPIT on 2 August 2021, and is no longer an electrical competent person scheme. If a page or a van is still citing either, the information is at least four years stale.
BS 7671 is a standard, not a law
The wiring regulations are a British Standard, drafted with the IET, and they are not legislation. Their force is indirect: Approved Document P makes compliance with BS 7671 the recognised way of showing that requirement P1 has been met.
The current version is BS 7671:2018+A4:2026, published on 15 April 2026, with the previous version withdrawn on 15 October 2026. We are inside that overlap window now, so a competent electrician should be able to tell you which version their certification is against. There is no 19th Edition and there has never been one, so an electrician advertising "19th Edition qualified" is describing a qualification that does not exist. Amendment 4 is an amendment to the 18th.
What to ask
Ask whether the electrician is registered with a competent person scheme for the work you want, whether this particular job is notifiable, who will notify it, and what certificates you will receive. An electrician who answers those four without hesitation is telling you a great deal about how the job will run.
Then check the answer rather than taking it on trust. The register at electricalcompetentperson.co.uk covers every authorised scheme in one place.
Registration is checkable, which is exactly why it is worth checking.