Landlords CAN raise rents to pay for EPC upgrades – Labour

hahaha!

“We have recently consulted on plans to require private landlords to meet higher energy performance standards, which will help deliver cheaper-to-heat homes.”

but NOT cheaper to rent!

Red Ed - Deal, Dead.

Well when the RRB is in force, the tenant will obviously challenge the increase with the Tribunal. Why wouldn’t they ? It’s free and even if they lose the rent increase only applies from the date of the Tribunal’s decision, which will take years given the inevitable backlog. The tenant saves a packet in rent.
But remember none of this EPC nonesense is law yet.

Isn't there something in the EPC thing that landlords won't have to get to C if someone refuses consent? That could either be the freeholder, tenant or Local Authority (if planning permission is required).
Doesn't that effectively mean existing tenants will have the choice of remaining in their homes, paying rent at the current level (plus a bit of inflation here and there) and retaining the heating system they are familiar with? All they need to do is refuse consent for EPC upgrades that they don't want. If they want the proposed upgrades by all means give consent and accept rent may need to increase to go towards the cost.
Refusing consent would only kick things down the road until that tenant chooses to vacate, at which point the upgrades would have to be done before reletting the property. With luck the requirements will have changed by then, more grants will be available, upgrades will be tax deductible. At the very least the property will be empty and much easier to work on. Rent on a newly upgraded, refurbished vacant property would be at a rate appropriate to it's condition.

In reality the EPC score doesn't seem to make much difference to the heating costs of properties. I pay the bills on 8 houses. The cheapest one is EPC C and the most expensive one is also EPC C. The one with EPC A is 3rd cheapest. The one with EPC E is 3rd most expensive. Orientation of the house seems to be the main factor and that's something the government can do nothing about.

I own a fairly standard end-of-terrace Victorian house—nothing unusual in the UK housing market. According to the latest EPC, it’s just six points short of reaching a C rating.

But both EPC consultants I’ve spoken to say the only way to bridge that gap is to externally insulate the end wall. I’ve had quotes of £33,000 for that work—which makes the entire thing economically unviable.

On another note after installing a brand-new, energy-efficient boiler, the EPC rating actually went down, not up. So the support Ed Miliband keeps mentioning for boiler upgrades is misleading.

I don’t want to sell this property, but unless the system changes to reflect the realities of older homes and provides sensible, cost-effective alternatives, I may have no choice. And that’s one less decent, well-kept property available to renters—not because it’s unfit, but because compliance is becoming absurdly out of reach.

Is it not time landlords were given 1 set of EPC RULES to follow and install?
But
1 maybe start with clear advice on non political bias information like tweeting the planning rules re heat pumps I heard about earlier today.
2 maybe starting with the EPC database having up to date information on what savings can be made.
3 if rents can be increased which I assume will still be additional income and taxable, can the capital costs for the EPC improvements be offset against ALL this extra expenditure?
Or will that be still a CGT offset able expenditure?
Is this a devious way of all us non working Landlords being tax collectors for the Chancellor?

Very confused!

This subject came up yesterday on GB News, and a lefty pundit said "landlords should not be allowed to raise rents to cover EPC upgrades, because having a warm home is a human right"

This is the kind of delusion we are up against.

Apparently landlords are just a support network for tenants now.

Dont you dare think about breaking even, let alone making a profit.

Reply to the comment left by David100 at 29/05/2025 - 10:54
It was a justice minister (Sarah Jackman) who came out with the truth and said that landlords will legally be able to increase rents to pay for EPC upgrades. This is "speaking truth to power."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaking_truth_to_power#:~:text=%22Speaking%20truth%20to%20power%22%20is,oppressive%2C%20authoritarian%20or%20an%20ideocracy.

In this link, speaking truth to power is defined as follows:

"[Speaking truth to power] is a non-violent political tactic, employed by dissidents against the received wisdom or propaganda of governments they regard as oppressive, authoritarian or an ideocracy. "

What Ed and his colleagues have being coming out with is just propaganda that promotes their ideocracy and bears little or no relation to the real world that the little people in the electorate, including small portfolio landlords and their tenants, actually have to live in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

Sarah Jackman needs to be congratulated for sticking her neck above the parapet and telling Ed the truth.

It always was the case, and it always will be the case, that unless labour changes the tax system to empower the electorate to invest in energy security the people paying for Ed's latest career move would be tenants.

I'm usually quite stoic about the constant churn of government bureaucratic craziness, but now I have a growing sense of sadness watching the UK spiralling the plug hole. We have the among the highest energy prices in the world, thanks in large part to our increasing reliance on inefficient and costly renewables; private sector inward investment is evaporating as companies seek cheaper and more business friendly jurisdictions all the while Labour are chasing net zero insanity.

Only someone completely clueless like Miliband could compare the previous mandatory EPC E to the proposed move to C.

Upgrading from F and G was really a case of low hanging fruit, loft insulation, any replacement boilers were a default improvement because they had to be condensing since 2005 anyway by law for the majority of replacements. I was replacing wooden single pane windows with full house uPVC DG because it was the obvious thing to do maintenance wise and it was a full tax offset as a replacement rather than upgrade.

Compare that to the silly situation now where my one remaining house is a D - only one point off a C. But will need something expensive such as solid wall insulation to get that one point improvement.

Make no mistake, Miliband is the most dangerously deluded of the lot of them.

Reply to the comment left by Keith Wellburn at 29/05/2025 - 11:41
That's absolutely right: That point about your investment being a "full tax offset" is absolutely critical.

The problem with socialist politicians like Ed, the leaders of the SNP and people like Putin, President Xi, Kim Yong Un and all socialist leaders is that they depend for their own job security and the maintenance of their own cabal on a disempowered electorate. Sometimes they also depend upon a war footing, whether that's a war against NATO or "warlords" (President Galtieri of Argentina was the same in the run up to the Falklands crisis) or a war against "climate change" with a "net-zero army".

But because the real cost of implementation of the technologies required to implement solutions to energy security and adoption of non-renewables is tens of thousands, not thousands, the only way to deliver this is to empower the electorate (including small portfolio landlords and owner occupiers) via the tax system. There is a fundamental mismatch between the values of people who have crawled into power on the basis of misleading their increasingly disempowered electorate, and are now desperately clinging to it, (like the SNP or Ed's net-zero cabal) and the solution to the problem of energy security with the adoption of sustainable renewables (e.g. not biomass grown in North America for example).

A growing proportion of the UK electorate is interested in the environment and in renewables. What is making the solutions undeliverable for them is their governments.