> Where I work, any equipment less than a year old does not require testing.

A common practice, and probably the daftest one in this whole PAT circus. As part of my "day job" I am responsible for commissioning the testing of over 10,000 items regularly.

Very few items fail. The majority of items that fail would have failed "out of the box" - the fault was a manufacturing defect, not a fault that was introduced during use.

If you're treating PAT seriously, rather than just a box-ticking exercise, then testing of new items is pretty much essential.