Lucy Dixon talks to Andrew Parkin, MD of Stroma Certification and chair of PEPA, kicking off a series of articles on the ways in which the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) can support our journey to net zero.
With energy costs soaring and more households being pushed into fuel poverty, there is, understandably, increasing focus on the energy performance of our buildings. This is particularly the case for domestic landlords who are likely to see new regulations set this year to ensure their properties attain EPC level C by 2025 where new tenancy agreements take place, and by 2028 for all domestic rental properties. Similar regulation is also planned for rental commercial buildings.
Andrew Parkin, MD of Stroma Certification and also the chair of PEPA – Property Energy Professionals Association – explains some of the EPC’s evolution, since it was introduced in 2007 as part of the Home Information Pack. “I’m a huge supporter of the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). I don’t think they are perfect, however, and there are areas for improvement. No industry should ever think that they’ve achieved everything they need to achieve – there is always room for improvement. The government are midway through their EPC Action Plan, which is part of this review and improve process.”
He says that the original objectives of the EPC, to focus on measuring and alleviating fuel poverty, are goals the industry needs to hone in on even more today. “The cost of heating and lighting, and running buildings were a key driver, especially for the domestic EPC, and to reduce these costs is an excellent thing to focus on.” Of course, the aim was also for the EPC to kickstart energy-efficiency refurbishments, whether that’s a homeowner sorting out some insulation before putting their house on the market or a local authority looking at the energy performance of its housing stock and making widespread improvements.
Parkin says: “The goal of the EPC was to promote action from a stakeholder, particularly somebody who owned the building, but also those who occupied the building, to try and improve the performance of that building through a set of fairly standard recommendations. And to hopefully better understand how that building performed, how each part of the building impacted on the performance and what would benefit the building.”
He describes this as a “fairly humble set of priorities” and says the EPC has been through many of its own improvements since then. “Its look and feel has changed. It’s gone from being a PDF that’s was stored on a central register – not controlled by the Government – to being a living, breathing document that is Government controlled, on a government run register, with access to some of the data behind the reports. In addition, the way that the data is collected, the use of technology like iPads, and the methodology behind the assessments has changed markedly.”
Andrew Parkin was an energy assessor himself back in 2007, and talks about the challenges he had when it came to the information the EPC could handle: “I couldn’t model the floor properly and I couldn’t model the solar PV on the roof. I had a limited set of information that I could input into the walls, the U values, I couldn’t alter anything. It has evolved massively since that point and now we are far closer to where we need to be and that move forwards is gathering pace.”
Fast-forward to today, and the cost of living crisis has made both homeowners, tenants and social landlords more aware than they’ve ever been of any energy-efficiency shortcomings in our homes. “There is a concern now that that wasn’t there before,” Parkin says.
“We’ve had, until very recently, relatively cheap fuel prices, predominately because we use mains gas or had access to gas in the majority of buildings in the UK. Only recently has that fuel price shifted in a dramatic way and therefore people are now focusing on how much it costs to run their property.”
This is where the EPC comes in, and anyone who has bought or sold a house in the last 15 years will be aware of them, even if they have never paid much attention before. “I don’t think people really understand what EPCs are, they probably haven’t spent a lot of time understanding it,” Parkin says. Homeowners aren’t the only stakeholders though, he explains: “Lenders are also focusing more on energy performance. The affordability of a property is a big deal, isn’t it? So if they’re making decisions on how much money to lend for a mortgage, they want to know they’re going to be able to afford their fuel bills. When you’ve got a 40 or 50% increase in fuel costs over a relatively short period of time, that does impact on affordability.”
The EPC doesn’t try to predict what the energy use and costs will be for individual families or people – there are too many variables once people move in for that – but it does, as Parkin says, “level the playing field” between different properties, allowing the buyer, or the lender, to compare one property’s potential to another. “The good news is you can plug more information in to the core EPC data. We have tools that allow you to take the EPC data and do something interesting with it around occupancy.”
The EPC also uses fuel prices as a major factor when calculating EPC ratings (the A-G rating on the EPC). Fuel prices used in the EPC are set, and not constantly updated, until there is a new methodology update; the EPC rating is currently done based on nearly 10-year-old energy prices. Gas has long been favoured by the government as a fuel source for heating our buildings and because it was relatively cheap compared to other fuels, gas heating was promoted in the EPC and generally received better ratings than other, more expensive fuel sources.
“Gas isn’t 4p per kWh anymore, it’s more like 7p or 8p, so people will wonder what that means for their EPC rating. Plus, one of the things that we’re hearing at the moment as a criticism around the EPC, is that it’s not recommending certain things. It’s not recommending heat pumps, for example.” This is obviously a hot topic with the Government trying to incentivise people to switch to renewable heating, but when technology like heat pumps are run on electricity, and the cost per kWh is so much higher than that of gas, it’s easy to see why the EPC wouldn’t recommend them. ‘That doesn’t chime with the message that we want to get people on to heat pumps. So one of the key things at the moment in policymakers’ heads is how do we square that circle? What’s the right thing to do here? We want people to move to heat pumps. But we don’t want to push people into fuel poverty as a result of that.”
Parkin says the public need all these types of things clearly explained to them, and thinks energy assessors can play a key role here. “The EPC is a starting point to get you onto a journey. But people may need a human being to talk to them about this, and energy assessors have been doing this for years whether the Government appreciates it or not. They are stood with stakeholders, explaining why the EPC says what it says and why recommendations appear in the order that they appear. So I think there’s a huge opportunity there for the Government to harness, a chance to educate. I think that’s one of the areas that we can improve in terms of awareness – we can get them on that journey.”
All of the above is being considered in the EPC Action Plan: www.gov.uk/government/publications/improving-energy-performance-certificates-action-plan-progress-report
