Emergency Repairs Protocol

An emergency repair is anything that threatens someone's safety or is causing serious damage to the property right now: no heating or hot water in winter, a gas smell, a burst pipe flooding a room, a broken external door or window that leaves the property insecure, or a total loss of electricity. Everything else, however urgent it feels to the tenant, is an urgent or routine repair and can wait for a scheduled visit rather than an out-of-hours callout.

This guide sets out how to build a simple emergency repairs protocol: what counts as an emergency, who to call and when, how fast you actually need to respond, and the mistakes that turn a manageable repair into a complaint, an insurance claim or a legal problem.

Your legal duty to repair

Under Section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, a landlord letting a property on a tenancy of less than seven years is responsible for keeping the structure and exterior in repair, and for keeping installations for the supply of water, gas, electricity, sanitation, heating and hot water in proper working order. This duty exists regardless of what the tenancy agreement says, and a clause trying to shift it onto the tenant has no legal effect. Our guide to the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 covers the full scope of this duty beyond emergencies.

The law does not set an exact number of hours you must respond within, but it does require you to act within a reasonable time once you know about a problem, and "reasonable" for a genuine emergency is measured in hours, not days. A tenant left without heating for a week in January, when you knew about the fault on day one, is a much weaker position to defend than one where you attended the same day and a part took a few days to source.

What counts as an emergency

A short, shared definition avoids arguments later about whether something should have been treated as urgent. Genuine emergencies typically include:

• No heating or hot water, particularly between October and April, or for a household with young children, older tenants or anyone with a health condition that makes cold conditions dangerous.
• A gas smell or suspected gas leak. Always treat this as an emergency and tell the tenant to turn off the gas supply at the meter and ventilate the property, then contact the National Gas Emergency Service on 0800 111 999 as well as your own contractor.
• Burst pipes or significant water leaks, especially where water is coming through a ceiling or affecting electrics.
• Total loss of electricity or water supply to the property.
• A broken external door, window or lock that leaves the property insecure.
• A blocked toilet where it is the only one in the property.

Things that feel urgent to a tenant but are not genuine emergencies include a dripping tap, a broken kitchen appliance other than the only means of cooking, cosmetic damage, or a noisy boiler that is still working. Setting this distinction out clearly when a tenancy starts, and again in any move-in pack, reduces the number of calls that arrive at 11pm for something that could easily wait until the morning.

Building the protocol

A working emergency protocol has four parts, and it is worth writing all four down rather than relying on memory, since the point of a protocol is that it works even when you are unavailable, on holiday or dealing with more than one property at once.

1. A clear definition of what counts as an emergency, shared with the tenant at move-in, so everyone is working from the same list rather than a judgement call made under stress.
2. A named out-of-hours contact route. This might be you directly, a property manager, or an out-of-hours emergency line if you use a letting agent. Whatever it is, the tenant needs to know it before an emergency happens, not be left searching for a number during one.
3. A vetted contractor for each core trade, gas, electrical, plumbing and general access or locksmith work, who you can call and who already knows the property or can attend quickly without a lengthy onboarding conversation. Our contractor vetting guide covers how to build this list before you need it, since finding a plumber for the first time at 9pm on a Sunday is a poor position to be in.
4. A response time target for each category, even an informal one. A common approach is same-day attendance for genuine emergencies, 24 to 48 hours for urgent but non-emergency issues, and a scheduled visit within one to two weeks for routine repairs.

Write this down somewhere the tenant can find it, such as in the tenancy welcome pack, and somewhere you can find it too, ideally alongside the property's other records rather than in a single contractor's phone number that only you have memorised.

A worked example

A tenant reports no heating on a Friday evening in December. Under a working protocol, the landlord confirms it is a genuine emergency, calls the vetted heating engineer on the list, and gets someone out first thing Saturday morning. The engineer diagnoses a failed part that needs ordering, but leaves two portable electric heaters with the tenant in the meantime and confirms a return visit for Monday once the part arrives. The tenant is inconvenienced but never left genuinely without heat, and there is a clear, dated record of prompt action if anything is ever questioned later.

Compare that with a landlord who has no engineer on standby, spends Saturday searching online for anyone available, and does not get someone out until Tuesday. The underlying fault might have been identical, but the response, and the tenant's reasonable view of how seriously it was taken, is completely different. Neither landlord caused the boiler to fail, but only one of them had already done the preparation that turns an emergency into a manageable Saturday morning call.

Common mistakes

A handful of habits turn a straightforward emergency into a bigger problem than it needed to be:

• Downgrading a genuine emergency because it is inconvenient. A gas smell or a burst pipe does not become less urgent because it happens on a bank holiday weekend.
• Having no contractor relationship until the moment you need one. Cold-calling for an emergency plumber at short notice usually means a higher price and a slower response than a contractor who already knows you and the property.
• Leaving the tenant without any update. Even if a part is genuinely delayed, telling the tenant what is happening and when to expect the next step matters almost as much as the repair itself for how the situation is perceived.
• Not documenting the timeline. A quick note of when the tenant reported the issue, when you responded, and when it was resolved is useful evidence if a dispute or a complaint about repair standards ever comes up later, including via the housing ombudsman route now being extended under the Renters' Rights Act reforms.
• Treating every callout as equally urgent. Attending a dripping tap with the same urgency as a burst pipe wastes contractor goodwill and money that is better saved for a genuine emergency.

If an emergency repair does lead to damage significant enough to claim on your landlord insurance, our guide to the insurance claims process covers what to document from the outset so a claim goes smoothly rather than being delayed by missing evidence.

How Property HQ helps

Property HQ keeps your vetted contractors, their contact details and past jobs against each property, so an emergency call does not start with a search for a number, and logs the timeline of every reported repair automatically, giving you a dated record of when an issue was reported and resolved without having to reconstruct it from memory or old messages.

Disclaimer

This guide is general information for UK landlords, not legal advice. Repairing obligations and response expectations can vary by tenancy and circumstance. Check GOV.UK or a qualified solicitor before relying on this guide for a specific repair dispute.