Department for Energy Security and Net Zero provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (184255):
Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, if he will make an assessment of the potential impact of his Department’s policies on improving the environmental performance of rented homes on levels of rental payments. (184255)
Tabled on: 10 May 2023
Answer:
Graham Stuart:
Alongside the consultation on improving the energy performance of privately rented homes, the Government has published an impact assessment, which includes an assessment of the potential impact on rental payments. The Government is refining the policy design to ensure the costs, circumstances, and potential impacts relating to energy efficiency improvements are fair and proportionate for landlords and tenants. The Government will publish a summary of consultation responses by the end of this year and will publish an updated impact assessment once the final policy decisions are made.
The answer was submitted on 18 May 2023 at 16:37.
May 21, 2023
Seems to me that any intervention of this sort is a breach of property ownership. Private property will effectively be banned! Outlawed Ć la Marxism?
Insist that even a particular sort of boiler be installed and how can it be said that a landlord is left with any rights?
Anyway. The govt. surely KNOWS all this will put a stop to rental..leaving unsaleable properties. And then whatā¦oh yesā¦.theyāll be hoovered up by global companies for a song!
May 21, 2023
+1 looks like that is the ConSocialist & Goveās plan to kill off the private rental sector. Strangle it with red tape, rip off taxation, vast over regulation, inability to evict tenants without paying vast sums to lawyers and waiting years and bank lending restrictions. A war on tenants too in effect.
If government comes to steal my properties from me should I not be allowed to defend them & fight back? Just as with any other thief?
May 21, 2023
Yes agree.
But just rememberedā¦isnāt there something about the govt. suspending all these rental regs for āasylumā rentals? Pathway back to rachmanism?
May 21, 2023
LL,
It is your bailywick so I believe all you say. It fits well with the capacity of this government to screwup everything they lay a finger on.
May 21, 2023
+1
May 21, 2023
Can you defend your rights? No, of course not, they thieve off us all the time with taxes and just make anything they want to do legal. That’s all there is to it.
May 21, 2023
Seeing how local authorities are the biggest landlords, are the council tax payers going to foot the bill to upgrade their stick, or will they be exempt
May 21, 2023
+many
Very good point.
And letās be honestā¦who else will fund it?
And who on earth will be able to afford to fund it what with inflation etc.
I see that there are twittering re the appalling noise of the dreadful heat pumps.
It will be unbearable.
Total mayhem.
May 21, 2023
Indeed. The people getting subsidised rents (clearly unfair competition do we not have a competition authority) will get it for free and those in market price housing and landlords will have to pay higher rents, huge insulation cost and higher taxes to cover all this green crap insanity.
May 21, 2023
Also in the owner occupied sector buyers can now pay huge stamp duty rates and developers pay SIL charges or have to provide affordable housing or other LEA fees plus huge costs to get to a planning approval. Yet more back door taxation, socialism and unfair subsidies so yet another rigged unfair market.
May 21, 2023
They may get their “upgrades” for free, but their homes will become colder and damper and more prone to mould. In short, the plan is to ensure that they live in squalor.
May 21, 2023
Or Serco, its cheaper than hotels and the standards and registrations for housing immigrants will suddenly be relaxed for just those lets.
May 21, 2023
+1 landlords have a duty to ensure they are entitled to live here before letting so this must will be relaxed for Serco or similar comps. Another rigged market. Has Sunak or his wife any interests in this area I wonder – as they had with the childcare market rigging I think?
Good list of Sunakās very many failures broken promises at the start of Richard Tice on Talk Radio just now at about 10.05.
May 21, 2023
Yes Cuebono.
I could name some but SJ won’t allow the naming and shaming of these global behemoths.
May 21, 2023
Is the govt. trying to nationalise the rental sector?
And to think how govt.s encouraged landlords many of whom had had their pensions compromised.
I saw a vid yesterday of NF talking to a bloke from one of those famous political mags.
Utterly astounding.
The bloke was extolling the incredible success of our immigration policy and saying how wonderfully multi culti this country is.
They really have no idea about the feelings, hopes, fears and resentments of everyday folk.
May 21, 2023
Indeed everyday folk whose wages are thus vastly reduced, cannot find good school places, housing, suffers from higher crime, a lack of road space and public transport, ever higher taxes and cannot even get to see an NHS GP or a Dentist or have the op they need in a timely manner.
May 21, 2023
total dependence on the State for how citizens will live, here we come, yet another dystopian vision becoming reality.
May 21, 2023
These dependent citizens will be very grateful to Sir Kier for giving them a vote to vote for people that will take more that the rest of us have spent generations building up to give to newcomers who arrive with nothing thus affecting poverty figures disproportionately and allow politicians to say poverty levels are falling not rising and they need to take more. We are in a downward spiral š
May 21, 2023
a-tracy
“we are in a downward spiral”
Yes we are, and it started with Gordon Brown being honest for once, saying he wanted a complete redistribution of wealth, and every government policy since then seems to be working towards this end.
Some day soon those who were/are creating the wealth will stop bothering, or will go abroad, then there will be less so called wealth to redistribute.
Given the government has no money, other than that that it prints or borrows, there will soon not be much to redistribute.
Still a few years to go yet, but they will get there in the end, quite what happens then not sure, perhaps our population will shrink as people leave and no longer wish to come here.
May 21, 2023
Following the USSR system, even with just Russia left continuing with it by ‘removing alternate people/parties’, we are nearing the single Party position for the Electorate in the UK.
Quelle difference?
May 22, 2023
Alan, their unionised sector, doesn’t want equalisation. If the NLW = Ā£10, then the nurse wants her 10% differential maintaining for her extra qualifications, skills and experience right the way up the grades.
If the rewards aren’t there for the people that get on and do, as you say, they will stop, and when they do, it will be quick and painful for others that rely on them.
May 21, 2023
***Should read Cuibono
May 21, 2023
American and British voters are being failed by the same big immigration lie
Our politicians claim to be seeking to bring the numbers down, while doing nothing to actually achieve that
Douglas Murray
Exactly.
How Macron slammed the brakes on net zero ā leaving Britain isolated
As Europe recognises the dangers of its green energy crusade, the UK is forging ahead. It is a decision we may live to regret. By Matt Oliver and Rebecca Rosman in Paris
So not as daft as our moronic MPs who nearly all support May’s insane Net Zero lunacy!
Surging immigration will leave the fate of the Tories in Nigel Farageās hands
The migration debate changes utterly when millions of people are being let into the U
James Frayne
Let us hope so. Then we might get a government that was no longer green crap socialist like this one or Labour.
Daniel Hannan today in the Telegraph.
The Conservative coalition is falling apart. Too many Tories have given up on freedom
Critics of free-marketeers are attacking a caricature. There is no conflict between economic liberty and nation
Only about 50 Tory MPs are remotely Tories that is the problem Dan they are green crap pushing, open door to migration (with no quality controls) socialists.
May 21, 2023
It was Boris who reduced the pledge from 2050 to 2030.
The Conservatives are in planned free fall, you donāt hear any defence to anything spread maliciously. No defence of hate crimes against Tory voters even though rules are all there in place to take action. A Deputy pm calling us all Scum that then allow all their supporters to yell it in our faces at every opportunity, Iāve had enough of double standards.
They allow the slander and mis-information to spread through social media without any facts and figures presented to fight back and they exist Iāve seen independent people actually worried about this country make good solid defences, thatās how you know a considerable number of Johnās colleagues have already given up so that Labour can come in and reverse everything they donāt think theyād get away with doing but want to. So many standing down and theyāre dithering just 18 months before any potential election to select a replacement and get them campaigning and learning from the current incumbent.
May 21, 2023
The government got away with tearing up contract between consenting parties by extending notice periods for landlords, not tenants, in 2020-21. Telling landlords and tenants what can and can’t be put into contract now is an extension of this. Luckily this has come at the top of the market anyway, and with a relatively benign CGT regime. The SELL signal is overwhelming.
May 21, 2023
Indeed because Labour have already said they want CGT to be in line with income tax youāve all been warned.
May 21, 2023
CGT ābenignā at 28% & without indexation? Hardy, buy a house for 200K goes up with inflation over the years to Ā£400k you have made nothing in real terms but get a tax bill of Ā£56k. Oh any you pay tax on rental āprofitsā you have not even actually made so taxes at over 100% often.
So Rishi Sunak and his wifeās Akshata Murtyās wealth fell by Ā£200 million in a year. No worse than that in real terms they lost perhaps another Ā£60 million as the pounds are now only worth about 88p now. Thanks to Bailey & Sunakās money printing insanity and lockdowns.
May 21, 2023
Our council built eleven or twelve new homes in our village, down the street from us, fully insulated with ground source heating.
They have spent all winter attempting to get the heating working properly without success and now one young couple have moved back into the local town because they cannot afford the energy bills, and they were not even warm!
The government is being lied to about about the efficiency of air and ground source heating and they are gullible enough to believe the lies. Vested interests, anyone?
May 21, 2023
+1
May 21, 2023
I’ve decided not to start renting out a property long term because of all this expensive, intrusive and unfair regulation being heaped on landlords. There’s no certainty it won’t get worse, too.
Plan B was to do holiday lets but that is now uncertain, as new rules – as yet undefined in scope or in geographical area of application- are coming sometime soon. No point in creating a couple of holiday lets out of one unit, with all these uncertainties.
No mainstream Party supports small business or individual enterprise.
May 21, 2023
Correct.
May 21, 2023
Oh but surely, Wanderer, there’s a national housing crisis and young people need somewhere to live and Michael Gove said targeted payments could be given to renters to help out…
Do you mean you don’t think the government seriously want to deal with the problem? You could be right if so, they probably don’t. Any more than Gove still wants to do anything about National Planning Policy Framework and housing numbers, despite all the media excitement last autumn. He and his colleagues have given up on governing, as far as I can see. They know their time’s up and nothing they do now will take effect before the next election.
May 21, 2023
The Department for Energy Security and Nett Zero is a total contradiction. Nett Zero is unobtainable, but the insanity of politicians in forcing us in that direction has rendered our once security of energy unobtainable. Insane because we are sitting on all the energy we need for the next ten years, but politicians have blocked its use.
May 21, 2023
+1 agricola.
May 21, 2023
Indeed as is the department for Women and Equality.
May 21, 2023
The people wingeing the loudest about net zero are those Tory MP’s with large buy-to-let portfolios who will be forced to insulate and upgrade their properties’s roofs to modern standards, with no water ingress etc. My heart breaks for them. The temerity of their tenants, expecting to live in a reasonably comfortable and warm home for the eye-watering rents they have to pay and who object to the annual no-fault eviction additional costs
May 21, 2023
Iāve not heard any Tory MPs wingeing about this, who are you talking about SK?
Donāt a lot of MPs who have to move to London if they get a ministerial role for their four/five year job then have to rent out their main home wouldnāt you rather than leave it empty?
I donāt have any rental properties, I could afford it as part of a savings strategy, especially as people were recommended to do it because pensions are so poor and so risky.
I donāt really agree with it as an investment vehicle because people generally buy the lowest cost homes and that makes it more difficult for first time buyers to get on the housing ladder which then slows down the whole chain.
May 21, 2023
I am looking to rent a family home at the moment. Last time we had to do this was in June 2020 when the market had just opened up again following Covid so there was plenty of supply but also massive demand. This removed the competition element from the market and rents were beginning to get silly.
This time around there is no supply and plenty of demand. The letting agents know that they will get an asking price offer in the first few viewings so if you don’t arrange a viewing at a time convenient to them as soon as the property goes becomes available you miss out. I think this is what generation rent have been experiencing for some time now but it has not applied to family homes.
The market is broken due lack of supply (demand being inorganically inflated by 1,000,000 arrivals each year). In acquiescing to the Twitter whining that landlords were fleecing renters they have allowed landlords to fleece renters.
Typical short-sighted government by our rulers.
May 21, 2023
Renter choice – that is what we need. The more good properties on the market the more the poor properties will have to improve in order to be let at a decent price. It does not need the sledgehammer of legislation.
Of course – choice is diminished when there are too many people in the country seeking those properties.
May 21, 2023
It seems there is nothing that this Government cannot make worse!
May 21, 2023
A young lad I know has serious health issues and lives on benefits. The house he rents has a 30 years old, floor mounted boiler. In the winter it cost Ā£300 a month to run. His choice is literally heat or eat. He sat freezing all winter wearing layer after layer of charity shop clothes. Yes, FORCE the landlord to fit a modern boiler.
And, of course, he fights a constant battle with mould.
May 21, 2023
Not really the landlords problem the problem is he does not have the money to heat the property. Gov. is prob. not paying enough rent to upgrade the property either. Damp will always happen in properties that are not heated and ventilated properly. Tenants who cannot afford to heat keep windows shut and often tenants hang wet clothes to dry all over the house too.
Landlords are not social services or a charity they need sufficient rent to keep the property well, pay the mortgage, repairs, taxes, agents fees, insurance, gas and elect. safety and all the restā¦ tenants need enough money to actually heat the place!
May 21, 2023
Spot on.
May 21, 2023
Modern boilers are slightly more efficient than old ones but not by very much. They are also often less reliable and more expensive to maintain. He still would probably not use it much as he will not have the money to do so.
May 22, 2023
Lifelogic
Agreed, far too much exaggerated hype about how much new boilers will save, compared to old.
May 21, 2023
But somebody else is paying for him. Should he have better conditions than a family of 4 or 5 on minimum wage who are net net paying his heating bills?
These new rules are about insulation anyway. New renters can always ask to see recent bills and EPC readings. All you’re doing is decreasing the supply with these tightening rules and regulations, and increasing the cost. Your friend will fork out the cost of a new boiler in extra rent over a year or two if the landlord is pushed to extra costs.
May 21, 2023
To ask the government ā
Has the communist imposed restrictions in vehicle travel with financial penalty ie ULEZ & CAZ , reduced the global temperature or reduced the sea level below suggested by the UN IPCC over the past decade
May 21, 2023
Iāve been renting out properties for many years. It used to produce a good profit but this is no longer the case. I can now get tax-free interest on my ISA savings with none of the hassles. All my properties have new boilers, double glazing, low-energy light bulbs, loft and cavity wall insulation but still they donāt meet the required āCā EPC rating. Iām expected to install solar panels and underfloor insulation at great personal expense. I feel a sense of responsibility to my tenants and donāt intend to evict them to sell up. However, if and when these EPC regulations come in I wonāt have a choice. This government is intent on destroying the private rental sector. Donāt think they will stop here because they will extend their EPC requirement to private housing. You wonāt be able to sell or re-mortgage your home until it meets their exacting energy efficiency targets. Of course, those living in their castles and mansions can buy an exemption certificate, another form of tax. Net Zero will be the death of this country. We see other Western countries turning away from their pledges but our government remains steadfastly on course to bankrupt the nation. As this doesnāt make any sense look for other reasons i.e. following the WEF manifesto.
May 22, 2023
+1
May 22, 2023
Well said. I’m in a similar position, except I only have one BtL.
May 22, 2023
Christine
Do not have any Buy to Let properties, but I agree we appear to be getting to a situation where Government policies will have a devaluation effect (restriction of sale) on the Property market as a whole.
Where is the choice in all of this ?
Certainly can understand new build regulations wanting higher and higher standards, but existing housing stock should left for their owners to retrofit products if they choose to do so.
We should not have retrospective regulations applied which in many cases simply cannot be met.
Government mission creep again I am afraid.
May 22, 2023
I have four properties bought for a tenth of today’s prices during the John Major bust when my job folded. Today’s value would mean a non indexed CGT bill of Ā£600k, probably rising when further tax grabs come in. So I can won’t be selling. I may not be here much longer following lung injury post AZ jab, so inheritance tax becomes a problem. I have lived in one of the properties myself with my partner for some years and she has put some of her own money into improvements. Because of the day removal of the option to end tenancies through Section 21, my partner will not be able to sell one of the other properties in order to pay HMRC, who come after beneficiaries like vultures and will demand Ā£640k. She will have to sell her home and be unable to evict the tenants from the other other houses, pay which are not I will the right area anyway.
I am therefore going to be terminate a tenancy now and sell before CGT is increased, and will have insufficient income to top up my inadequate pension. HMG will have less income tax but a nice tax grab of 150k CGT. This, but I believe is the plan for the along with the big money taking over from the small investor. It’s all in line with the WEF/KC3 agendas.
May 22, 2023
Sorry. My new auto correct has changed wording after the screen is covered. It keep adding ‘I and adding other phrases.
May 21, 2023
Estate Agents used to say buyers ignored Energy Performance data when seeking a home. Sellers included it only because it was a legal requirement left over from the crazy HIPS (Home Information Pack Scheme) created by Blair. HIPS was a backward concept requiring the Seller rather than the Buyer to conduct the survey! Inevitably failure caused it to be dumped, but it should never have started. Any new policy needs extreme care before touch. Renters want simple solutions, often lasting for just six months.
May 22, 2023
+1
May 21, 2023
Mike.
Having recently replaced a very old boiler with a new one I have only seen a small reduction in my monthly bill.
The real problem is the huge rise in the price of gas and electricity.
May 21, 2023
Only 18% of our electricity is from burning fossil fuels today. Great.
May 21, 2023
Demand is low because it’s a warm sunny Sunday with good winds.
May 21, 2023
Sit John, an internet search for the ministerially alleged ‘published’ government impact assessments of the effect of Net Zero on rental payments brings up only….your own parliamentary question of 10th May!!!
I’ve read the previously published government reports – pure woffle and unanswered questions.
I suggest you ask the Minister why he allows his civil servants to mislead so grievously in providing his answers.
May 22, 2023
I have a 2-bed house BtL in a small west country town. It’s in reasonable decorative condition and “D” on the EPC. The cheaper options for improving efficiency are all done. All that is left is ripping out the programmable electric radiators I installed a few years ago (there’s no gas) and
1. putting in a heat pump or possibly storage radiators;
2. installing underfloor heating;
3. installing solar panels
4. possibly replacing the double glazing, which is probably 20 years old
I won’t be doing any of them. The property doesn’t generate sufficient rent to justify the expenditure and, since it isn’t in a high-rent area, will never generate sufficient rent to justify it.
It’s on the market.
This Not-a-Conservative-Government is relentlessly against private landlords. They want them forced out of the market.
May 22, 2023
The forthcoming rules for energy certificate C level is causing problems.
One of my properties was grade D but had wall and floor insulation 4x better than a solid wall, the latest boiler, I double glazing and no loss through the roof, I as it’s a flat. Without any changes and a new helpful assessor, I it’s now a C. š
My other houses have wall, floor and roof insulation to a high standard but not sufficient for a heat pump, which would be more expensive for the tenant to run than the modern boiler. If this bill isn’t dropped, I I will end these tenancies and move into one of the houses myself in order to avoid paying double council tax or CGT if sold.