How does my house have an electrical certificate?

Very little you can do I'm afraid. You should have had an electrical installation condition report carried out before you exchanged contracts (would have cost you about £100). You could then have negotiated with the seller ir got them to get the work put right at their cost. As it is, its really buyer beware. You may be able to try going down the small claims court, (see guidance from your solicitor) but the contract the electrician had was with the previous owner and not you and it may transpire that any warranty is not transferable? Although unsafe, you will have a hard job suing the electrician for negligence and he/she may just stop trading and close the company. Unfortunately it sounds like a fake certificate was issued and it may well be that the company/person who installed the wiring are not even part P registered anyway.

Hi Adam, What you can do depends on who did the work. If he was a registered electrician, then contacting his/her competency scheme owner (ELECSA, NICEIC etc) will start the ball rolling, the scheme providers have insurances for this kind of thing. If he wasn't registered, then you should call local trading standards to complain, if you don't it will only happen again to someone else. You may also have a claim against the original owner of the home if they did not declare that they used an unregistered electrician to work on the house, check with your solicitor on this one. The solicitors searches should have picked up on any local building control submissions, the electrical work needs to be on there, if not why not? Good luck

Hi Adam, was this a new install by the electrician who test and inspected the property? E.G Did they install new cable back to your fuse board? Or was it existing wiring, and did he provide you with an electrical installation certificate or an electrical installation condition report? (It will state this on the top of the front sheet of certificate.) Either way if the wiring was that bad it would have flagged up at the time it was tested as either a high R1+R2 reading or a very poor insulation resistance reading. I think your best bet would be to contact trading standards for advice on what to do next. Thanks hope this helps.

It was signed off by an inspector of electrics, not a general electrician, should there have been an immediate problem it would have tripped, the electrician may be exagerating, call in the inspector and question why, he will go over it with a fine tooth comb