The boss of a retrofit firm has warned that the Government’s EPC reforms risk misclassifying millions of homes, misdirecting public funds and delaying action on cold, inefficient homes.

Anna Moore (main image), chief executive of Domna, says plans to replace the Standard Assessment Procedure with a new Home Energy Model (HEM), along with more frequent updates, particularly for rental properties.

“HEM doesn’t address the critical flaws,” says Moore. “This sounds technical, but it matters, because if the models are wrong, all the legislation built upon them will fail.”

Over two million homes rated ‘efficient’ on paper are nowhere near it.”

Moore says that while EPCs have helped highlight precisely where millions of people are living in cold, damp homes most people don’t realise is that over two million homes rated ‘efficient’ on paper are nowhere near it.

“For years, the inaccurate, and at times, totally corrupt, proxy for measuring homes’ environmental performance was politely ignored,” she adds.

Moore also criticises cheap energy assessments which are based on short, visual property visits.

Sloppy data

“The result is sloppy data collection – basic measures like floor area are often wrong – and fiddling with the numbers to qualify homes for grants.

“Studies have found errors as high as plus-or-minus eight points, enough to misclassify a home entirely.

“We need better training and higher professional standards to solve carelessness and corruption.”

The government says it will explore integration with smart-meter data, but that should be central, not optional, says Moore.

And the explanation that using the data would breach privacy rules set out under GDPR could be dismissed if it were anonymised. She suggests employing AI to help crunch data to better predict performance at the individual home level and validate results against actual usage using data science and machine-learning.

“Access to smart-meter data, or at least the datasets behind EPCs, would boost accuracy even further,” adds Moore.

Realistic

Propertymark has also recently revealed its response to the Government consultation on the changes, its Head of Policy Timothy Douglas saying that: “We want to see more energy efficient homes, but the targets must be realistic and achievable.

“We have long said that the UK Government must do more to understand the finances of landlords and introduce measures that take into account the diverse nature of property types across England and Wales in the private rented sector.

“The timescales for implementing these changes will be key with recent legislative change in Wales and new proposals via the Renters’ Rights Bill in England.

“We look forward to continuing to engage with the UK Government on this issue, but it is vital that EPC reforms are clarified first and given time to bed-in, until we have sufficient numbers of skilled tradespeople in the market to carry out upgrades, and so that policymakers recognise the huge costs in doing works particularly the impact on landlords with lower value properties.”

Read more about the proposed changes to EPCs.