Call to impose EPC rules on landlords as tenants ration energy

Reply to the comment left by Slooky at 16/09/2025 – 19:48
France has lots of nuclear. Our nuclear strategy is a mess.
My electric bills in France are halff UK rates.
They also have a different approach. For example immersion heaters are 1kw and on all the time to create base load. Whereas our immersion is at least 3kw for rapid heating so more bursty load and usually timed.
The energy efficiency of French homes is usually worse than UK. Wood burners are the norm outside cities.

Reply to the comment left by Suspicious Steve at 17/09/2025 – 09:01
Thanks for explaining. The house we stay in still has gaps between the roof and the walls.! I do love the windmills they look beautiful. I don’t understand people’s objections to them in the UK. As long as they are not near people’s properties I don’t see a problem.

Reply to the comment left by Slooky at 17/09/2025 – 09:34
I think one of the other issues in UK is that we have been paying all these levies, we have lots of wind energy, but the grid can’t get it to where it’s needed because the grid isn’t up to it. We’ve been paying the levies but not getting the infrastructure.

And in terms of local electricity generation we don’t have the capital allowances to make it worthwhile.

Reply to the comment left by Beaver at 17/09/2025 – 10:00
Also, when it’s too windy, they have to turn them off, and when there’s no wind, they can’t produce any energy. But even when they aren’t producing energy, we still have to pay them.

Useless negotiating by the government (Tory and Labour) or scam?

Reply to the comment left by NewYorkie at 17/09/2025 – 11:31
It’s very hard to know who gets incentivised or how isn’t it? I’ve often wondered at the fact that the companies who are the gatekeepers for any grants that might be available (never to me) are companies selling wall insulation of one kind or another.

But properties in Sweden and Germany have been generating electricity locally, and storing it locally as hydrogen in both Germany and the Scandinavian countries for years. There’s nothing at all in our tax system that truly incentivises local energy generation and storage.

In fact, if you’re a small portfolio non-incorporated landlord, not only are there no capital allowances helping you to make the situation better, even just from the point of view of improving energy security, the truth is that you are actually penalised for raising finance.

And on top of all that nonsense, your tenants (the people paying both the electricity or gas bills and also the extra tax bill being imposed upon the landlord in the form of higher rents that the landlord has no option but to pass on to avoid a cash loss) are charged more tax for electricity than they are for gas.

Both conservative and labour policies in recent years have been a bit like Donald Trump’s tariffs: American consumers pay for those in the form of higher prices. Tenants pay the price for the incoherence of recent conservative and labour policies: The only good thing that you can say about these two parties are that the SNP in Scotland have been worse.

Instead of empowering local generation and storage, somebody somewhere gets incentivised to buy windmills that aren’t even made in the UK, possibly not even in Europe, and having generated the energy they can’t get it to where it’s needed.

Reply to the comment left by Slooky at 17/09/2025 – 09:34
They are dreadfully inefficient, actually consume a lot of oil, are difficult to dispose of and each replacement leaves a large concrete spike in the ground, as to Bird life, an utter disaster especially for larger breeds. As to ‘beautiful’, drive down from Reims toward Troyes in France on the A26 at night, red light pollution you can see for miles all blinking away in their hundreds, it’s appalling.

Reply to the comment left by moneymanager at 17/09/2025 – 12:01
And yet a lot of houses with south-facing rooves or walls could have photovoltaics instead and store their energy (rather than sending it back to the grid, which isn’t worth it financially): Something already being done in parts of Europe and Scandinavia, including at more northerly latitudes than where most people in the UK are. But the tax system in the UK penalises you for doing this…it’s the preserve of either the very wealthy, or poor people who can access grants.

For most of us in the “squeezed middle”, which is where most landlords sit, despite all the hot air that’s been pumped out by conservative politicians over the last decade and is still being pumped out by labour politicians now, the only thing that makes sense today after considering everything (including tax) is a modern condensing gas boiler.

Competent politicians….where are you?

my flat was a EPC grade C , said upgrade with new windows would give a few extra point, so I did this. Put it up for sale and it is now a grade D , the new windows made no difference, but they added it now needed floor insulation on a top floor flat. Costing between £5,000 and £10,000. A different surveyor. Why would you need insulation , when you get the heat from the floor below. First time I have heard of this needing done. Sometimes I wonder if these surveyors know what they are talking about or getting money from builders. The tenant cut the wifi /thermo for the boiler as he didn’t want it coming on and having to pay for it. He would rather spend the money on cigs. His choice.

Reply to the comment left by loretta wight at 17/09/2025 – 16:47
If you search this site for posts from Mick Roberts on EPCs you’ll find a recommendation for someone who can help you beat the system.

But the truth is….if as a landlord you have to spend so much time working out how to beat the system you have to wonder whether it’s the system that’s wrong.

Reply to the comment left by loretta wight at 17/09/2025 – 16:47
The EPC assessment is a black box – who knows what it’s doing. It does seem very biased towards big projects.

I’ve come across lots of examples where improvements make the score worse.

I suspect councils are buying fake EPCs to get to C
Blog post about it here:
https://think-we-are-stupid.blogspot.com/2025/03/are-councils-buying-fake-epcs.html
as my friend lives in a terraced council house which amazingly got a C yet the privately owned neighbours which have been improved are D and E !!

I looked at doing an EPC assessor course to understand more about how it’s calculated. 3 days of computer on-line training and you’re almost an assessor !!

I wrote this blog about it.
https://think-we-are-stupid.blogspot.com/2025/02/landlord-epcs-part-2.html

EPCs have zero transparency and seems to have zero linkage to SAP (Standard Assessment Proceedure) which was created by the Building Research Establishment.