NAPIT Member
One registration, several trades — that is the whole argument
What NAPIT is
NAPIT — the National Association of Professional Inspectors and Testers — is a competent person scheme covering electrical, heating, plumbing and other building services. Registration allows self-certification under Part P (electrical) and Part G (sanitation, hot water safety and water efficiency) of the Building Regulations.
Registration costs around £280 a year, typically £150 to £300 depending on how many trades and operatives you register, renewing annually.
That scope is the point of the scheme and the reason to choose it. Every other competent person scheme on this site covers one discipline. NAPIT covers several under a single registration, a single assessment cycle and a single fee.
What you need
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Relevant qualifications per discipline.
For electrical: 18th Edition BS 7671 and NVQ Level 3. For heating and plumbing: appropriate City & Guilds or equivalent. Requirements differ by discipline, so check the current list for the trades you intend to register. Evidence: certificates for each.
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Calibrated test equipment
Relevant to your discipline. Evidence: the equipment and its calibration records.
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Insurance.
Minimum £2m public liability, plus employer’s liability if you have staff. Evidence: the schedule.
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A technical assessment
, including review of recent completed work. Evidence: jobs available to inspect.
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The registration fee
, scaled by trades and operatives.
What you have to keep doing
Renew annually, and expect NAPIT to inspect a sample of completed work each year.
Notify building control within 30 days of notifiable work, through the NAPIT online portal.
The multi-trade case, with the arithmetic
For a single-discipline electrician, choosing between NAPIT and NICEIC is a close call decided mostly by preference and by what your clients recognise.
For a firm that genuinely does more than one thing, it stops being close.
Consider a small business doing domestic electrical work and bathroom installations. Under separate schemes that is an electrical registration plus a plumbing or heating registration: two annual fees, two assessments to prepare for, two sets of paperwork, two renewal dates, two portals for notifying work. Under NAPIT it is one registration covering both, one assessment visit, and one place to notify.
The fee saving is real but it is the smaller half. The larger half is that one assessment cycle is meaningfully less disruptive than two. Preparing for an assessment means having recent work available, records in order and equipment calibrated, and doing that twice a year for two schemes is more than twice the friction of doing it once.
There is a caveat worth stating. If your electrical work is largely commercial and your clients specify NICEIC by name — which some insurers and main contractors do — then the multi-trade saving does not help, because you will need NICEIC regardless. The multi-trade argument wins for domestic and small-commercial firms with genuinely mixed disciplines, which is a very large number of businesses.
Part G is the half nobody registers for
Part P is well understood. Part G is the one firms hold without realising they should be certifying under it.
Part G covers sanitation, hot water safety and water efficiency — and the hot water safety element is the part with teeth. Unvented hot water systems are notifiable, and installing one without the competence to certify it is a genuine compliance gap rather than a paperwork one, because an incorrectly installed unvented cylinder is a real hazard.
A great many plumbers and heating engineers install unvented systems and treat the notification loosely, because nobody has ever asked. The exposure surfaces at the same moments everything else does — a property sale, an insurance claim, a landlord’s compliance audit — and by then the installation is years old.
If you install unvented cylinders, registering for the Part G scope you are already working in is the least expensive compliance decision available to you, and NAPIT’s multi-discipline registration is the straightforward way to hold it alongside the electrical side.
The mistakes we see most
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Registering one trade when you work in two.
The whole advantage of the scheme is the scope, and it is opt-in per discipline.
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Ignoring Part G on unvented work.
Notifiable, hazardous when wrong, and widely treated casually.
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Assuming NAPIT and NICEIC are interchangeable to clients.
For Building Regulations they are equivalent; a commercial client specifying a name is not applying that logic.
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Letting calibration slip.
Same failure as every scheme that inspects your testing.
The annual sample inspection, and choosing what it sees
NAPIT inspects a sample of your completed work every year, and firms treat that as something that happens to them. There is more agency in it than people assume, and preparing properly costs a morning.
The assessor is checking that the work matches the certification: that what you recorded is what is installed, that the testing was done and the results are plausible, and that the documentation is complete and legible. They are not hunting for a reason to fail you — an assessor’s day goes better when the paperwork matches the wall.
Two things make it go smoothly. The first is having recent work genuinely available: a job that is finished, certified, and where you can get access. Firms that scramble here are usually the ones whose recent work is all in occupied properties they can no longer easily get into, which is an access problem rather than a quality one and is entirely avoidable with a little thought about which jobs you nominate.
The second is that the certificate and the installation must agree in the details. Circuit descriptions matching what is actually on the board. Test results that correspond to the cable and the protective device. The board schedule reflecting the final configuration rather than the intended one. These drift when a job changes on site and the paperwork is completed from memory afterwards, which is the single most common source of findings.
Neither is about competence. Both are about finishing the job on paper at the same time as finishing it on site, which is the habit every scheme on this site is quietly trying to instil.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Registration is recorded per discipline rather than as one flag, because the scope is the thing that matters and “are we registered” is the wrong question — the right one is “are we registered for this“.
Notifiable jobs are flagged by type as they are logged, so a 30-day window on an unvented cylinder or a consumer unit change is something the system raises rather than something that depends on the engineer remembering which category the job fell into.
Questions multi-trade firms ask
Is NAPIT as good as NICEIC? For Building Regulations self-certification they are equivalent. NICEIC has more consumer and commercial name recognition; NAPIT covers more disciplines.
Can I register for electrical only? Yes, and then the comparison is close. The advantage appears when you register more than one.
What is Part G? Sanitation, hot water safety and water efficiency — including unvented hot water systems, which are notifiable.
How much is it? Roughly £150 to £300 a year depending on trades and operatives.
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