Buyers asking for recent gas and electric safety certificates?

[BlueCherryBlossom]

As part of their enquiries our (FTB) buyers have asked us via our solicitor to provide gas and electric safety certificates.

Am I right in thinking this is not something we are obliged to provide?

For the sake of moving things along and reducing hassle we are thinking of getting the gas safety done (as it's the cheaper easier one) and telling them they are welcome to access the house to get their own electrical survey done?

Is that reasonable?

To our knowledge there's nothing amiss with the gas or electrics and we've just had a new boiler put in so presumably the engineer that installed it would have flagged any major gas issues?

On the flip side it's an old house and we've only ever rewired the downstairs (about 7 years ago)... if they do get an electrical survey then is that going to open a can of worms when inevitably it finds things that might need addressing in the future? (They've been frankly ridiculous about any mentions of 'can't rule out' back-covering stuff in their homebuyers survey- which was actually a fabulous survey for such an old house, so they aren't the most laid back of buyers!).

We have just had an EICR carried out on our rental as it's part of our obligation as landlords - it was £180 including VAT. Gas safe was £96 incl. This is London borders.

You can tell them to arrange it themselves though, that's also perfectly reasonable (and what we did when we bought our last property - we wanted an EICR to see if a full rewire was necessary, and it was).

No don't do it. Remind them that people generally only have these checks done if they're required to by law because they're renting out their property. They probably just don't realise this.

Is it actually them asking or is it their solicitor? Our solicitor asked our vendors loads of questions that we never asked or even really cared about, one of which was the safety checks. It showed up on our homebuyers survey as a red flag but that's really common and it never worried us.

You're not obliged to provide them and I don't think it'll be an issue as your buyers can get their own done when they move in.

@BlueCherryBlossom We had a flood in our area and although our house couldn't be flooded, our postcode was red flagged by insurance companies. I thought we HAD to supply the gas and electricity certificates and did so. The house was eleven years old so it was a cheap and easy thing to provide.