Draft Energy
Performance of Buildings (England and Wales) (Amendment)
Regulations 2022
9.25am
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up,
Housing and Communities ()
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Energy Performance of
Buildings (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2022.
This statutory instrument was laid before the House on Monday 31
January, under paragraph 12 (1) of schedule 7 of the European
Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. It will be debated in the House of
Lords in due course. Mirroring legislation has been prepared for
data registered against properties in Northern Ireland, which
will be considered by the Assembly. Scotland operates its own
energy performance of buildings register and will not be covered
by the regulations.
This is probably one of the most straightforward SI that Members
will ever be asked to approve. It relates to the statutory fees
that are charged when data are registered for energy performance
certificates, display energy certificates and air conditioning
inspection reports for properties in England and Wales. Fees are
applied to two classes of data registration covering domestic and
non-domestic properties. The regulations propose to reduce the
fees from £1.64 to £1.50 when data are lodged for domestic
properties, and from £1.89 to £1.70 for non-domestic
properties.
The Committee may recall that fees charged for data registrations
in England and Wales were last adjusted nearly a year ago, and I
understand that you were in the Chair, Mr Gray, on that historic
occasion too.
The Chair
I remember it well.
It was my predecessor who introduced a SI similar to the one we
are debating. A significant reduction in fees was possible
because the Government had invested in a new, cloud-based digital
platform and had moved away from the fixed hardware model, run on
concession contracts, which had been in place since 2008. In the
past 12 months, contractual costs for building the service have
fallen out of the model, which means we have the opportunity to
extend last year’s reductions further. I sincerely hope that
colleagues will therefore join me in supporting the regulations
and I commend them to the Committee.
9.27am
(Greenwich and Woolwich)
(Lab)
It is a pleasure, as always, to serve with you in the Chair, Mr
Gray. I thank the Minister for so ably summarising the
regulations, which, for reasons that will be obvious to Committee
members, are entirely straightforward, as the Minister said, and
uncontroversial. None the less, as I said to the hon. Gentleman
before the Committee sat, I am going to make him earn his salary
by asking a series of quick questions, some general and some
specific to the SI.
First, in relation to the general issue of—
The Chair
Order. Before the hon. Gentleman starts, it might be worth
reminding him that he may only put questions relating to this
particular SI and not to more general matters at all. That would
not be in order.
Thank you for clarifying that, Mr Gray. My questions relate
directly to the instrument in the sense that it concerns EPC
ratings.
The Minister is responsible for the climate change portfolio and
net zero policy in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and
Communities, and therefore he will have a keen grasp of the scale
of the challenge we face to retrofit our country’s extremely
inefficient building stock, and the importance to that national
effort of accurate information about current ratings. Given that
the regulations relate to the EPC register, I am keen to
understand whether the Department knows the exact proportion of
buildings in England and Wales that are on that register and,
crucially, whether all buildings with EPC ratings are adding
their names to that register. How confident is he that it is
accurate?
Secondly, as for the effect of the regulations, the explanatory
memorandum notes that as a result of the progressive shift to
cloud-based systems, as the Minister noted, the Government have
been overcharging the fees to register for some time. The precise
period of overcharging is not specified. The fees are required to
cover the cost of the register and although the fees reduction
may seem small, when aggregated we are talking about serious
amounts of money that have been overcharged and over-recorded
during that period, whatever it might be. I simply wish to know
how long that overcharging has run; how much has been collected
as a result and what the Government have done with that
money?
9.29am
I thank the shadow Minister for his questions. To start at the
end, it is absolutely our intention not to overcharge. At the
start of year, however, we have to estimate the number of
lodgements that are likely to be made and the associated costs.
One sum is then divided by the other, and that comes up with the
fee. Given that we changed the figures to reduce prices last
year, we can only do that annually, because we must make some
assessment at the start of the year of the expected volume of
registrations. We have done that and have therefore recalibrated
to reduce fees again at the first reasonable opportunity. We had
some concern that market instability caused by the pandemic might
have led to registration figures dropping significantly and that
we had to price accordingly, but that has not proved to be the
case and we have been able to adjust the figures again. That was
absolutely what we intended to do and there was no intention to
overcharge.
As to the hon. Gentleman’s question about the number of cases and
whether they are all recorded, I understand that we have based
the figures on roughly 155,000 cases lodged. To me, that feels as
though we are being pretty thorough in terms of capturing the
information on the system. It is absolutely our intention to
ensure that the integrity of the system is as robust as possible
and that all the data are collected.
As for the hon. Gentleman’s point about the importance of EPCs to
achieving our net zero ambition, I believe that they are pivotal
to it. We will therefore continue to review the EPC performance
in terms of how and what we measure, and the information that we
give to those who use the certificates to make future decisions.
We will ensure that they are as useful as possible. I look
forward to continuing to work with the shadow Minister to ensure
that, collectively, we deliver a robust energy performance
process.
Question put and agreed to.
