What is the problem with sinking the socket into the brickwork?
Is it the extra effort (and therefore time), or is it that it penetrates the outer skin of the cavity wall which then needs to be sealed to make it waterproof to prevent water entering the cavity?
Talking of dodgy wiring, my parents bought a very old cottage which had been badly modernised some time in the 1960s. The internal walls were very old lath-and-plaster, and the backing boxes for the sockets and switches had been glued to the opposite laths because there was no way to screw it in, also the cavity between the laths for one wall and the wall in the next room was almost but not quite deep enough to take a backing box, so all the sockets stood out slightly proud.
The wires had been dropped into the cavity from the loft (for first-floor rooms) or from below the floorboards (for ground-floor rooms) without being enclosed in trunking, and were arranged higgledy-piggledy with a large excess of cable instead of being pulled taut to keep them roughly vertical, so when you were hanging pictures you had no way of knowing where the socket/lighting cables ran.
The storage heaters were fed from heavy-duty 40A shower cable cable that emerged from roughly-cut holes in the wall and went directly to the heater, rather than going to a wall-mounted switch into which proper flexible cable was then wired from heater to switch.
The state of the partition walls was so bad that we had to rip them out anyway and start again with floor-to-ceiling battens every so often and plasterboard nailed to it, so we took the opportunity to increase the size of the cavity so it would accommodate the backing boxes, though I forget how we fixed them to the wall. We rewired everything (with new cable, just in case...) and ran the cable in proper vertically mounted trunking.
That was in the days (1970s) when you could do these tasks yourself without needing examination/approval by an electrician.
What are the rules about doing electrical work yourself nowadays? Is it just bathrooms and kitchens (because of the presence of water) where you need to get an electrician to do the work or to examine your work? What about removing existing wiring to obsolete appliances - eg a ventilation fan that is no longer used? Is it legal to disconnect the incoming feed from the terminals of a ceiling-mounted switch and connect it to a terminal block or junction box behind the switch to terminate the still-live cable? That's what I did with ours - but I got my father-in-law to check it, since he's an electrician: he said that's how he'd have dealt with the situation; he liked the way that I'd even attached a big "Live" label to the terminal block in case anyone were ever to unscrew the switch and expose the block and its wiring.
What about changing a ceiling switch or a ceiling-mounted light fitting in a bathroom where the old one is broken? Does that need to be signed-off?
Going back to the cottage, the wiring wasn't the only thing that had been bodged. We found a big breezeblock-lined pit in the back garden with a sewer pipe emerging into it half way up. It had clearly never been used as a cesspit and the house had a newer septic tank which was fine. We worked out
*why* the original pit had never been used when we examined the levels: the outlet of this sewer pipe into the breezeblock pit was *higher* by a foot than the level of the toilet in the house... How were they intending shit to go uphill? :-)It was useful as a dumping ground for the old rusty battered storage heaters and all the rubble we generated from building work, and my parents then got someone to fill in the rest of the hole with a JCB and level out the back garden. In several centuries some archaeologist is going dig down and find those storage heaters. I wonder if he'll work out the problem with the levels and realise why it was never used for its intended purpose!