The issue is manageable. And if it pushes slumlords out of business no bad thing.
Just another scare sensationalism from the rentier class
Sorry but making them “energy efficient” would mean knocking down period-buildings or at least defacing them by replacing their sash windows with double glazed windows that look out of place.
The EPC for my flat expired last year; lettings agency phoned me in a panic two days before the expiry date to arrange an inspection.
Said inspection involved someone walking up into my flat, taking a picture of the storage heater in the living room (there’s also one in the bedroom – a room that was never entered), making a phone call to the landlord – and then leaving. EPC was upgraded from a ‘D’ to a ‘C’. The property also went from a flat to a maisonette and went from having low energy lighting in 57% of fixed outlets to having lower energy lighting in all them.
At the time two of the bulbs in the kitchen were dead; and with the exception of a bulb in the living room every other was an old style one (I had some left over so was using them up before replacing with more economical ones).
The insulation in the loft also increased by 50mm.
Extortionate rent and extortionate energy bills. Both of these issues could be fixed but the government are busy playing divide and conquer to distract the public from their failure to build more houses, regulate landlords, and to tax energy companies appropriately. People also happily turned on Insulate Britain, despite them highlighting an important issue that many renters would probably back now that bills have gone up so much. People were late for a few days but face years of high energy bills because the government no longer has to worry about people backing disruptive protesters.
Don’t see why there shouldn’t be laws against this i.e. Any property to be rented out must have a minimum efficiency rating of C, and while we’re at it, all property to be rented out have boiler, kitchen and bathroom no older than 10 years. Signed off by inspection.
my landlord and letting agents lied about the energy rating of the place I’m living. Advertised as a B, told it was B, in the paperwork its a D.
Our radiators have no control valve, they’re either on and you burn yourself on them or they’re off and you’re cold. The wind blows in the front door, we have blown double glazing and a window that is stuck open too high to reach from outside safely.
Landlords should be able to claim tax relief on work that improves insulation but there is a mindset that wishes to reduce private landlords which suppresses supply therefore increases demand and rents. Social housing is hardly the answer look at Grenfell.
Repossess the inefficient houses from landlords who don’t give a shit and see how quickly it changes
The concensus is landlords and letting agents are scum.
I have condensation in all the double glazing and half the windows whistle when its windy. I’d say its pretty inefficient xD
Fucking tell me about it. Our house pisses the heat out like no tomorrow and we have constant issues with out boiler loosing pressure. When they did send someone out about it he also measured all the rooms and radiators in the house and told us the radiators weren’t good enough.
Turns out, when the landlord “renovated” he removed the second radiator from the front room which meant the remaining small one can’t heat the room properly and the kitchen renovation also meant that radiator is t big enough either.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually like the house we live in but you can definitely see where corners were cut when they modernised.
I rent and still have halogen bulb fittings. 12v MR16s which apparently can’t be straight swapped for LEDs. Needs LED drivers and what not.
Landlord doesn’t care.
I just use lamps with LEDs wherever I can.
I’m pretty sure the flat I spent 4 hellish years living in, from 2016-2020, is still the coldest place in the known universe. It had an energy rating of G, presumably as in “generous to even give this a rating”.
Renting: six out of ten landlords do not provide adequate housing.
There.
Fixed it for you.
Doubt it, more like 8/10 renters living in energy inefficient homes.
Is it really that surprising given the amount of old houses in the country? I bet it’s quite similar for people who own their homes as well.
I’m not surprised. These investors have zero interest in making these homes efficient and habitable. So glad we finally managed to buy a place as I couldn’t cope with one more amateur landlord.
I don’t understand. The average EPC rating of all housing in the UK is D; 60% of all houses would need improvement to reach EPC C.
This article says that 60% of the rented sample are worse than a C. So that’s in line with the average for all other housing. Is this really revelatory?
Just like the prices of inefficient houses are lower to buy, one would expect that rents are already lower for less efficient homes. And where a landlord has paid to improve efficiency, the rent should be higher to offset those costs. So this should already be factored in, surely?
One of the biggest issues we have in the UK is how old a lot of our housing stock is and how difficult and expensive it is to improve it. For example, 30% of our stock has solid walls – which is phenomenally expensive to retrofit with insulation and can’t be done with a tenant in situ (which makes it even harder hard to do – as you have to evict your tenant and then try to find a builder).
The article doesn’t suggest how we do this, without displacing tens of thousands of renters.
thats not so bad….. 9 out of 10 uk homes are energy inefficient
Surprised that it’s that… low?
Homes need to be built energy efficient and with air con or heat pumps as standard to help with the horrible summers we’ll be having.
Seize equity percentage of the property based on energy efficiency rating with 0% equity seized above a certain energy efficiency rating.
Asset seizure without compensation is the only way to force the asset holder to make changes to their behaviour immediately, nobody is going to make profit as a landlord if 5% of the property is seized from them each year by the state due to their failure on energy efficiency, they also can’t increase rent to cover the cost as they cannot buy back the seized equity so their underlying asset has lost permanent value forever if they choose not to act.
If they decide not to do anything then the state gets to own a profitable asset for free, they can then make the energy efficiency improvement themselves and continue to profit from their new asset.
I rented a house that was 11 or 12… maybe 13 degrees on unusually mild dsys in winter, with the heating on all day. It was fucking baltic.
If you sat on the toilet upstairs you could _feel_ the cold from the window a couple of meters away and you could poke a finger through holes in some of the window frames.
Landlord did us a favour kicking us out becausr he wanted the house back. I hope he fucking freezes to death.
Our landlord had an inspection done a while ago regarding how energy efficient the flat was. Told me he’d send me the report.
He never did. I suspect it is due to how badly the place is rated. We have cavity walls with no insulation, most of our windows are ancient double glazing with wooden frames, 30 year old storage heaters, etc.
Edit: just found the report (as it’s available publicly) and the flat has an E rating. The minimum is D in Scotland. So this place needs to be brought up to a D rating by 2025 or else fines are coming my landlords way.
That’s part of what insulate Britain was campaigning for before they got shut down by anti-protest laws and the public brainwashed by the media.
It’s me!!! I’m already poor and have to rent which is way more expensive that a mortgage payment and because there is such poor insulation and ventilation my house is not only freezing (with a terrible, well out of date CH system) I am constantly cleaning mould! But I have to have my heating on more than a better insulated house because I don’t want hypothermia, so my energy bill is sky high. Oh and don’t forget the outdated electrics that are probably costing me more too.
Just keeping the poor, poor ✌️
I mean, are the renters prepared to pay increased rent to make the homes “energy efficient”? If not, then stop complaining.
The vast majority of buy to let landlords are selfish cunts, hence why they’re buy to let landlords in the first place. They’re not going to do anything that costs money they don’t have to
Slumlords should have some legal requirements on energy efficiency
32 comments
Well, my landlord doesn’t want to spend any money making it efficient but is happy to keep putting the rent up.
Build more homes/flats, do it by relaxing planning, given how much better new homes are in this regard.
Flood the markets with new development.
Landlords don’t pay the heating bill, so no surprise.
Article is bollocks. Based on a tiny sample in Blackpool
Its about 40% for older private rent and 20% for post 2012 builds. See figure 5: [https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/articles/energyefficiencyofhousinginenglandandwales/2022](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/articles/energyefficiencyofhousinginenglandandwales/2022)
The issue is manageable. And if it pushes slumlords out of business no bad thing.
Just another scare sensationalism from the rentier class
Sorry but making them “energy efficient” would mean knocking down period-buildings or at least defacing them by replacing their sash windows with double glazed windows that look out of place.
The EPC for my flat expired last year; lettings agency phoned me in a panic two days before the expiry date to arrange an inspection.
Said inspection involved someone walking up into my flat, taking a picture of the storage heater in the living room (there’s also one in the bedroom – a room that was never entered), making a phone call to the landlord – and then leaving. EPC was upgraded from a ‘D’ to a ‘C’. The property also went from a flat to a maisonette and went from having low energy lighting in 57% of fixed outlets to having lower energy lighting in all them.
At the time two of the bulbs in the kitchen were dead; and with the exception of a bulb in the living room every other was an old style one (I had some left over so was using them up before replacing with more economical ones).
The insulation in the loft also increased by 50mm.
Extortionate rent and extortionate energy bills. Both of these issues could be fixed but the government are busy playing divide and conquer to distract the public from their failure to build more houses, regulate landlords, and to tax energy companies appropriately. People also happily turned on Insulate Britain, despite them highlighting an important issue that many renters would probably back now that bills have gone up so much. People were late for a few days but face years of high energy bills because the government no longer has to worry about people backing disruptive protesters.
Don’t see why there shouldn’t be laws against this i.e. Any property to be rented out must have a minimum efficiency rating of C, and while we’re at it, all property to be rented out have boiler, kitchen and bathroom no older than 10 years. Signed off by inspection.
my landlord and letting agents lied about the energy rating of the place I’m living. Advertised as a B, told it was B, in the paperwork its a D.
Our radiators have no control valve, they’re either on and you burn yourself on them or they’re off and you’re cold. The wind blows in the front door, we have blown double glazing and a window that is stuck open too high to reach from outside safely.
Landlords should be able to claim tax relief on work that improves insulation but there is a mindset that wishes to reduce private landlords which suppresses supply therefore increases demand and rents. Social housing is hardly the answer look at Grenfell.
Repossess the inefficient houses from landlords who don’t give a shit and see how quickly it changes
The concensus is landlords and letting agents are scum.
I have condensation in all the double glazing and half the windows whistle when its windy. I’d say its pretty inefficient xD
Fucking tell me about it. Our house pisses the heat out like no tomorrow and we have constant issues with out boiler loosing pressure. When they did send someone out about it he also measured all the rooms and radiators in the house and told us the radiators weren’t good enough.
Turns out, when the landlord “renovated” he removed the second radiator from the front room which meant the remaining small one can’t heat the room properly and the kitchen renovation also meant that radiator is t big enough either.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually like the house we live in but you can definitely see where corners were cut when they modernised.
I rent and still have halogen bulb fittings. 12v MR16s which apparently can’t be straight swapped for LEDs. Needs LED drivers and what not.
Landlord doesn’t care.
I just use lamps with LEDs wherever I can.
I’m pretty sure the flat I spent 4 hellish years living in, from 2016-2020, is still the coldest place in the known universe. It had an energy rating of G, presumably as in “generous to even give this a rating”.
Renting: six out of ten landlords do not provide adequate housing.
There.
Fixed it for you.
Doubt it, more like 8/10 renters living in energy inefficient homes.
Is it really that surprising given the amount of old houses in the country? I bet it’s quite similar for people who own their homes as well.
I’m not surprised. These investors have zero interest in making these homes efficient and habitable. So glad we finally managed to buy a place as I couldn’t cope with one more amateur landlord.
I don’t understand. The average EPC rating of all housing in the UK is D; 60% of all houses would need improvement to reach EPC C.
This article says that 60% of the rented sample are worse than a C. So that’s in line with the average for all other housing. Is this really revelatory?
Just like the prices of inefficient houses are lower to buy, one would expect that rents are already lower for less efficient homes. And where a landlord has paid to improve efficiency, the rent should be higher to offset those costs. So this should already be factored in, surely?
One of the biggest issues we have in the UK is how old a lot of our housing stock is and how difficult and expensive it is to improve it. For example, 30% of our stock has solid walls – which is phenomenally expensive to retrofit with insulation and can’t be done with a tenant in situ (which makes it even harder hard to do – as you have to evict your tenant and then try to find a builder).
The article doesn’t suggest how we do this, without displacing tens of thousands of renters.
thats not so bad….. 9 out of 10 uk homes are energy inefficient
Surprised that it’s that… low?
Homes need to be built energy efficient and with air con or heat pumps as standard to help with the horrible summers we’ll be having.
Seize equity percentage of the property based on energy efficiency rating with 0% equity seized above a certain energy efficiency rating.
Asset seizure without compensation is the only way to force the asset holder to make changes to their behaviour immediately, nobody is going to make profit as a landlord if 5% of the property is seized from them each year by the state due to their failure on energy efficiency, they also can’t increase rent to cover the cost as they cannot buy back the seized equity so their underlying asset has lost permanent value forever if they choose not to act.
If they decide not to do anything then the state gets to own a profitable asset for free, they can then make the energy efficiency improvement themselves and continue to profit from their new asset.
I rented a house that was 11 or 12… maybe 13 degrees on unusually mild dsys in winter, with the heating on all day. It was fucking baltic.
If you sat on the toilet upstairs you could _feel_ the cold from the window a couple of meters away and you could poke a finger through holes in some of the window frames.
Landlord did us a favour kicking us out becausr he wanted the house back. I hope he fucking freezes to death.
Our landlord had an inspection done a while ago regarding how energy efficient the flat was. Told me he’d send me the report.
He never did. I suspect it is due to how badly the place is rated. We have cavity walls with no insulation, most of our windows are ancient double glazing with wooden frames, 30 year old storage heaters, etc.
Edit: just found the report (as it’s available publicly) and the flat has an E rating. The minimum is D in Scotland. So this place needs to be brought up to a D rating by 2025 or else fines are coming my landlords way.
That’s part of what insulate Britain was campaigning for before they got shut down by anti-protest laws and the public brainwashed by the media.
It’s me!!! I’m already poor and have to rent which is way more expensive that a mortgage payment and because there is such poor insulation and ventilation my house is not only freezing (with a terrible, well out of date CH system) I am constantly cleaning mould! But I have to have my heating on more than a better insulated house because I don’t want hypothermia, so my energy bill is sky high. Oh and don’t forget the outdated electrics that are probably costing me more too.
Just keeping the poor, poor ✌️
I mean, are the renters prepared to pay increased rent to make the homes “energy efficient”? If not, then stop complaining.
The vast majority of buy to let landlords are selfish cunts, hence why they’re buy to let landlords in the first place. They’re not going to do anything that costs money they don’t have to
Slumlords should have some legal requirements on energy efficiency