We're buying a house privately because we know the current owners well and there's no need to employ an estate agent.
We've had a RICS Level 2 survey done and it hasn't flagged up much apart from the lack of any current Electrical Installation Condition Report and also the equivalent paperwork for the boiler/gas installation.
We've never bought a house before so whilst this may seem to be a stupid question, who actually pays for these tests/inspections - us as the buyers or them as the vendors?
Am I right in thinking that we just pass on the surveyors report to our solicitor and they contact the vendor's solicitor and ask them to have it done at their expense or do we stand the cost?
There is no legal requirement to provide an EICR or Gas Safe certificates when selling a house, so if you want one its up to you to pay.
If the vendor is keen to sell and there is no one else wanting to buy then they may be persuaded to provide one. One reason to use an estate agent as a vendor is that they can in still competition among the buyers and drive the price up..
Of course if they obtain it, you have no contract with the provider so I don't believe that they have any liability to you should it be incomplete...
... and if you obtain them the provider will hide behind difficulties of obtaining access to hidden spaces to carry out inspections....
Do you know how old the boiler is? Has it been serviced regularly? When the house was last rewired? What work has been done since Part-P was introduced? Are there any certificates of work?
Basically the EICR and the gas safety cert are just paper trails for some basic checks. There is no requirement for the vendor to have them, and there is no requirement for the vendor to stump up the cost. The costs of them are not great in the grand scheme of things: ~£200 for the EICR[*] and ~£100 for the gas cert.
Whether you want to have them done depends on the condition of the property and how much you think there might be lurking.
Most EICR issues are relatively small fixes; the main things might be needing a rewire (thousands) or a new consumer unit (mid hundreds; although a consumer unit may be outdated and not to modern standards it's not necessarily unsafe and need not be replaced).
For gas, as long as the boiler isn't actively condemned as in need of replacement then any issues are likely to be cheap to fix (low hundreds).
At the end of the day, you may well be able to judge the condition of the property as to how well looked after it's been. (although beware places that have been 'builderified' with a new coat of white paint...)
Theo
[*] There are certain fly-by-night EICR outfits who offer to do them for cheap, for landlords who need an EICR to let a property and don't care as long as it passes. Steer clear of these, because you want somebody to do an actual thorough inspection, not a drive-by.
There's another type of EICR inspector who comes up with lots of spurious faults and charges a pretty penny to fix them. If faults are found, get somebody else to remedy them.
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