The humble EPC has survived and could become the cornerstone of an information-rich housing market, writes Ben Derbyshire.
Amid election jitters from both sides, the challenge of delivering a zero carbon future has been taking a battering.
A groundswell of resistance based on the price to be paid by households in the thick of a lingering cost-of-living crisis has forced the government to retreat from its plan. Minimum energy efficiency standards were abandoned last year.
In February, the Labour Party U-turned on its green investment plans, ditching its pledge to spend £28 billion a year on green policies — slashing those spending plans by nearly 75 percent.
We’ll take whatever government support we can get, but enlightened self-interest can be an effective driver. The more of us agitating for mechanisms to induce consumer driven enhancements of our products and services, the faster things will change
Energy use is just one of many ways in which the performance of homes might be improved if the providers of housing were to do more in their own interests to engage consumers. It’s almost as if housing conditions are now so bad, and the market for renting and buying homes so distorted, that the industry has abandoned all expectation of obtaining competitive advantage through improving data and information on how homes work for their hard-pressed occupants.
We are fortunate indeed that membership of the European Union prevented the Coalition government consigning Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) to the conflagration of government standards along with Home Information Packs. The argument then was that the bureaucracy involved was an unnecessary burden on the housing market. The reality now is that the market penetration of EPCs is a vital platform from which we can build to enhance the performance of our notoriously inefficient homes.
Thankfully, with the passage of time and the wisdom of years, the government now understands their potential so that EPCs will not be thrown, post Brexit, into the channel with the rest of the alleged EU red tape.
Indeed, DLUHC now has an EPC Plan of Action with three top priorities; driving accuracy, reliability and trust in the system; encouraging home improvements to reach EPC band C through consumer engagement; and building a data infrastructure to enable policy changes to leverage improvements.
The Property Energy Professionals Association (PEPA), a trade body, goes much further with a manifesto calling for, within five years, 100% penetration of EPCs in the market, reduction in the duration of EPC validity from ten years to just three and direct relationship between stamp duty and council tax based on the EPC band of your property.
The relationship between suppliers and consumers in the housing industry is, as I have often said, notoriously poor. But the changes mooted here have the potential to transform the EPC from a meaningless irrelevance to a vital lever by means of which consumer-pull will improve performance, and suppliers can gain competitive advantage by increasing awareness in the market of relative value. Investing in EPC’s functionality and market penetration has the potential to restore meaning to the relationship.
This mechanism, using modest nudges of policy, allows governments of either complexion to trigger movement in the market to better, more efficient new and existing housing, steering us relatively painlessly towards our net zero target. When grandstanding gestures involving billions in public spending or draconian regulation of landlords only led to repeated embarrassing volte face, there is so much that can be achieved through modest tweaks in the tools we already have.
Once the humble EPC is established as the cornerstone of an information rich housing market, we can build towards the level of data about performance common in most other industries.
And don’t imagine there are no developers up for this future. In his foreword to HTA Design’s publication The Case for Home Performance Labelling (still available from the Housing Forum) a former big six chief executive wrote, ‘I find it difficult to understand why, when the reduced running costs of new homes are so overwhelming, we are not delivering (better labelling) today. If we can know the salt and calorie content of a bowl of soup, why can’t we know more about the performance of a new home?’ Well said.
Ben Derbyshire, chair, HTA Design and former president of RIBA
His book Home Truths is available to buy here: https://www.ribabooks.com/Home-Truths_9781399942256#