Landlords Wish to Get Rid of EPC’s

The latest report by the National Landlords Association – a nationwide body that represents the interest of UK landlords – suggests that owners of rental properties are determined that mandatory energy certificates are useless. In their opinion, the majority of tenants simply ignore the information provided in the energy certificates; the report also revealed that British landlords are planning to call a meeting of its Advice Line in order to question the relevance of the certificates. Currently, all British and Welsh tenancies agreed since October 2008 are required to have an energy performance certificate (EPC) by law. EPCs generally contain the information about property’s energy efficiency as well as about energy and carbon emissions, which are graded from A to G. Meanwhile, representatives of the National Landlords Association claim that EPCs are useless due to a number of reasons. The first one is that tenants generally put EPCs at the bottom of the list of their requirements if they do at all. The second one is that energy efficiency grade rarely affects tenants’ decision on whether to live in the property or not especially given the fact that an average EPC score in Britain is D. Moreover, the study showed a large number of tenants are not even aware of the EPC law. Mrs. Sussanne Chambers, National Landlords Association director is determined that most tenants are not interested in EPC, while the latter cost landlords a lot of money and nerves. She added that, as always, the responsible landlords are suffering from the law, while others, who simply ignore it, are as successful in the lettings business as those who don’t. On the other side of the spectrum, Home Information Packs (HIPs) provider claims that EPCs are not to be cancelled; rather, tenants should become more educated about the benefits of energy certificates. For instance, HIPs representative, Mr. Jon Evans, recently said that one of the latest HIP studies revealed that as much as 30% of tenants do follow EPC recommendations. He highlighted that an energy performance certificate is valid for 10 years, which means that landlords only have to go through the registration procedure once in a decade.