Do you have £15,000 spare to bring your property up to EPC C by 2028 for new tenancies? That’s per property, so if you have a portfolio of 12, you will need £180,000. This after interest rates have been hiked from 1-2 % to 4-6% over the past four years. Many landlords have seen a quadrupling of monthly finance costs, taxed at 20% if you are a higher rate tax payer.

This is one proposal in the government’s consultation on minimum energy efficiency standards in the private rented sector, which continues until 2 May 2025. Please search for it and let your views be known.

The consultation document purports that refits will costs £6,100 to £6,800 on average. Most of my Energy Performance Certificates are rated D and tell me that only solid wall insulation will make a real difference and that will cost between £4,000 and £14,000. This raises a whole host of other issues. Firstly, the vagaries of proposed works on EPCs – can we get more accurate pricing of possible improvements? Ultimately, we have to get up to three quotes and tradespeople are getting fed up with this and starting to charge. Secondly, many landlords have Victorian terraced properties that will need internal solid wall insulation, which means changing plumbing and electrics and could then leave the property with a humidity problem. Because many of us have bought older properties, around one third of the 4.7m homes in the PRS are pre-1919 and the hardest to retrofit. In fact, a massive 2.5m homes in this sector are EPC D or below.

Next, consider the proposed timescale. The government says that regulations will be in place by the end of 2026 and it expects all PRS homes to comply by 2030. It seems pointless commencing works now, before you know what you are trying to comply with. To add another layer of uncertainty, the methodology for EPCs is under review. A property that is currently C rated, may no longer be C when rated under the new – as yet unknown – methodology.