Draft Energy Performance of Buildings (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2022

Matthew Pennycook Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2022 General Committees

[Matthew Pennycook (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.

[Matthew Pennycook]

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?