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There‘s nothing wrong with the lamp holder that I could see. The one problem might be that there‘s access to single-insulated wires when you open the light to change the lamp.

It’s certainly not your responsibility to check whether the electrician has done a proper job but unfortunately sometimes even professionals can do questionable things. I don’t see why you shouldn‘t be able to use the existing flex for 12 V. If you want to do an exceptionally neat job, get some...

IMO the electrician did a poor job, the flex isn‘t suitable for fixed mains wiring. The neatest way of doing this would have been to run T&E from the switch to a flex outlet and a short length of flex to the LED driver. I doubt it’s going to cause any issues though.

So basically two accessories (cooker switch and dryer socket) melted within a fairly short period of time? That seems to suggest poor connections (that lead to overheating) or poor quality accessories. Get an EICR done and specifically ask the electrician to look for loose connections.

Is there a meter in this building or where does the supply come from?

Is that flex coming out of the wall?

There's no real limit on how many circuits you can have. At some point having more circuits just becomes impractical. So yes, you can certainly do what you suggested, you'll just need a fairly substantial consumer unit and lots of cable. Generally there are two aspects of circuit planning - how...

The maximum length is the wiring to the most distant socket. Do you want the second RCD in case the one at the CU fails? You can do that but it’s usually considered unnecessary. If you insist you could have a standard RCD in a small enclosure like a garage CU.

If the tumble dryer and heat pump don’t run at the same time it should be fine. Is the garage on a fused spur? If not you‘d probably be able to run both at the same time.

A surprisingly large number of countries seems to consider earthing unnecessary faff. At least in Japan pretty much everything is double-insulated. I‘ve even seen a double-insulated full-sized fridge.

Soldering and heatshrink tubing would be an option too. Light manufacturers typically use closed-end parallel crimps but I don’t know where a DIYer could find those.

Are you sure the more brittle ones aren‘t urea resin? That certainly used to be a very common material for white accessories (even back when black ones were bakelite) and for quality products still is. Budget manufacturers tend to use more flexible thermoset plastics and have been since the...

Why would the test button not work downstream of an ELCB? All it does is connect a resistor between L on the supply side and N on the load side (or vice versa), which always creates an imbalance that should trip the RCD. Inducing an earth fault definitely wouldn‘t have tripped the RCD if the...

Certainly, yet most, if not all other European countries seem to be perfectly happy with sockets much closer to baths and showers than BS 7671 allows. I follow electrical discussions from Germany and the only fatalities in the past fifteen years or so were caused by a combination of ancient...

I sometimes wonder if each future edition of BS 7671 is going to reduce the minimum distance by 0.5 m until it’s eventually harmonised to „outside zones“.

Is it definitely a ring and not a 4 mm2 radial?

I thought the FCUs were going into the upper kitchen units to be hidden, that‘s why the cables don‘t go all the way to the ceiling. The T&E might be dark grey and just looks black in the pictures because of poor lighting. Polish YDYp is always white as far as I know.

All continental European countries that I‘m aware of allow sockets outside of the usual zones 0-2 surrounding baths and showers. 30 mA RCD protection is mandatory. Shaver sockets with isolation transformers pretty much disappeared when the regs were changed, in Germany and Austria back in the 70s.

How about adding two sockets just for the lights?

If the light works you‘ve got a switched live and a neutral coming in and obe of each going to the next light. Perfectly fine. All you need to do is measure whether red is actually the switch line, and if it is, connect the new light as you suggested. If you find the colours are the wrong way...