Peers back tougher home energy efficiency targets

The House of Lords has backed tough new energy efficiency targets, including one which stipulates that all homes must meet the EPC (energy performance certificate) Band C standard by 2035.

During the latest reading of the Energy Security Bill, which took place on Monday night, peers voted by 227 votes to 197 to back a Labour amendment setting out the tightening up of minimum energy efficiency standards (MEES).

The amendment, tabled by opposition environment spokesperson Baroness Hayman, requires the government to publish a National Warmer Homes and Businesses Action Plan no later than six months after the bill has become law.

This would set out how the government intends to deliver new targets, including ensuring that all homes meet EPC Band C by 2035 where “practical, cost effective and affordable” and Band B by 2028 in all non-domestic properties.

The document would also set out the government plans to ensure all installations of heating appliances and connections to heat networks are low-carbon by 2035.

The government’s existing policy, as set out in its Clean Growth Strategy, is that it wants to see as many homes as possible meet the EPC Band C standard by 2035.

For non-domestic rented buildings, it has consulted on a MEES of EPC Band C by 2027 and EPC Band B by 2030.

The government has also consulted on moves to ensure all private rented home let out to new tenants meet EPC Band C  from 1 April 2025, extending this requirement to all tenancies by 1 April 2028. However this consultation took place more than two years ago and ministers only committed to respond to it last month in the government’s Energy Security Plan.

Lord Deben, the Conservative former Cabinet minister who now chairs the Climate Change Committee, pleaded with the government not to put Tory peers “yet again in the embarrassing position” of forcing them to choose between loyalty to the government or voting for measures to improve energy efficiency.

But arguing against the Labour amendment, energy minister Lord Callanan said the mooted action plan is “unnecessary” because the government has already published its 2021 Heat and Buildings Strategy.

And while the government supported the principle of better energy efficiency in the private rented sector, he said it is “not an easy policy” to make progress on because of the potential knock-on consequences for housing supply.

“There are already shortages of rented accommodation in many parts of the country and it is certainly not my ambition to further increase those shortages, so we will have to be careful how we proceed in that legislation.”

The vote to back tougher energy efficiency standards took place on the same evening that House of Lords defied the government by backing the introduction of a new net zero duty for Ofgem.