In April 2022, the 成人快手 Shared Data unit reported that six out of 10 recently inspected UK rental homes failed to meet a proposed new standard for energy efficiency.
The project involved analysing over 94 million recommendations from 24 million inspections in England and Wales up to the end of 2022, as well as a further 1.5 million inspections in Scotland, and found:
- Out of 1.9 million lettings given EPC ratings in England and Wales over the last five full years (2018-22), 1.1 million, or 57%, were graded below a C.
- Some 5% of privately rented properties did not have the potential to reach grade ‘C’, according to assessors.
- A quarter of renters were using portable heaters as a secondary source of warmth in their homes.
- Insulation was the most frequently recommended improvement measure for private rental properties, making up 35% of all recommendations.
- Inspections of rental properties in the last five years found, on average, occupants could save almost a third (32%) on their current heating costs if their landlords made all the recommended improvements.
- London boroughs and coastal areas made up 9 of the top 10 local authorities by proportion of properties that did not have the potential to reach grade C.
Background and briefing
A .
Get the data
- Shared spreadsheet: (also as )
- England and Wales:
- Scotland:
- Northern Ireland: () via .
- The ONS provide data on which was used for contextual data on the proportion of property types covered by the EPCs, and for methodological guidance.
Full data on energy performance certificates (EPCs) is provided in a series of separate CSV files which was combined for analysis. For the England and Wales data, this was attempted and . In addition, a to unzip the files where there wasn't enough capacity on the computer. For the Scotland data data was combined using cat in command line.
The resulting files were too large for data analysis in spreadsheets, R or Python, so they were uploaded to Google BigQuery for initial analysis and filtering .
The results of that initial analysis were further analysed using R notebooks in the .
Visualisation
- Stacked bar chart: Local authorities in England and Wales with the highest proportion of properties given a D-G EPC rating, 2018-2022
- Map: Average home heat loss after five hours in 2020, by country (Europe)
Interviews
- Louise, renter in Blackpool
- Adam Royal, 25, renter in Blackpool
- Rachelle Earwaker, senior economist, Joseph Rowntree Foundation
- Conal Land, case worker, Citizens Advice
- Chris Norris, director of policy, National Residential Landlords Association
- Jonathan Winston, support manager, The Carbon Trust
- Spokesperson, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Partner usage
The Shared Data Unit makes data journalism available to news organisations across the media industry, as part of a partnership between the 成人快手 and the News Media Association. Stories generated by the partnership included:
- Bristol Cable:
- Daily Express:
- Lichfield Live:
- The Lochside Press:
- This is Money:
- The Scotsman:
- We Love Stornoway:
Related repos
- In March 2020, the 成人快手 Shared Data unit .
- All