A retrofit firm boss has warned that ill thought-out 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 the government’s consultation proposes replacing the Standard Assessment Procedure with a new Home Energy Model (HEM), as well as 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.”
Writing in Inside Housing she says EPCs have helped highlight precisely where millions of people are living in cold, damp homes.
“But what most people don’t realise is that over two million homes rated ‘efficient’ on paper are actually nowhere near it,” she adds. “For years, the inaccurate, and at times, totally corrupt, proxy for measuring homes’ environmental performance was politely ignored.”
Moore also criticises cheap energy assessments which are based on short, visual inspections.
“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 ± 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, asserts Moore. 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.
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