Energy Performance Certificates: enabling the home energy transition

This report was issued in January 2024 in advance of a planned government consultation on EPC reform to inform stakeholder and government thinking. 

EPCs were first introduced to inform home purchase or renting decisions and to provide simple energy efficiency recommendations. They have since become central to the way we demonstrate and discuss the energy efficiency of our homes in England and Wales, evolving to have much wider applications: as well as providing consumer advice and information, they are used in delivering retrofit programmes, regulations, and financing.   

EPCs need reform to work well for these multiple uses, and so they can provide advice and information for the net zero transformation in home energy technologies.

Key recommendations

Our January 2024 report Energy Performance Certificates: Enabling the Home Energy Transition provides a series of recommendations in three areas: metrics and applications; improving quality, trust and reach; skills and training. Some of these recommendations have now been taken forward in government proposals for EPC reform.

• EPCs have a ten-year lifespan, meaning that a certificate provided when a home is sold or rented may be up to a decade old. With major changes planned to the way we use energy in our homes, the report argues that an EPC should be valid for five years to provide more up to date advice and information for homeowners.
• The headline EPC rating is based on the cost to heat and light the home. While this will remain an important metric to report on the certificates, moving to a new set of headline ratings is key, including a stable measure of energy efficiency.
• Government should enable more of the detailed data collected to produce an EPC to be used to plan retrofit, while respecting homeowners’ privacy and data protection.
• Domestic Energy Assessors – who visit homes to collect the data for EPCs – play a key part in ensuring their accuracy. A review and strengthening of the training and continuous professional development requirements for domestic energy assessors could build trust and confidence in the system and ensure that assessors can help drive the net zero transition of our housing stock.
• 40% of homes do not have an EPC. Often these are the least energy efficient homes which have not been recently improved or changed hands. Official development of a provisional EPC rating for these homes could help local authorities and homeowners to identify retrofit opportunities and plan grants and support.
• In 2022 just 5% of people had used the advice on the certificate to improve their home. By making this advice easier to use, the EPC can become a much more widely used and trusted tool, particularly as millions of households transition to low carbon heating over the next decade.

EPCs have the potential to be a powerful tool to enable homeowners, government and the retrofit industry to deliver the low carbon transformation of our homes. Targeted policy reforms to make EPCs more up-to-date, accurate and usable will be key to supporting the domestic energy journey to net zero.

Read the full report

For all the findings and recommendations, read the full report.