Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps the Government is taking to ensure that homes are meeting their expected energy efficiency standards.

We have committed to introduce a Future Homes Standard from 2025 which means that new homes will be fit for the future, with low carbon heating and lower energy use through high levels of energy efficiency. In October 2019 we published a consultation on the Future Homes Standard and the 2020 version of Part L of the Building Regulations. The Future Homes Standard consultation closed on 7 February 2020. The responses we have received will be considered carefully and a Government response will be published in due course.

Within the consultation we also made several proposals to improve the as-built performance of new homes, ensuring that they perform more closely to the predicted energy efficiency requirements. These proposals included improving the accuracy of as-built energy calculations and providing clearer information about the as-built specifications of new buildings to both Building Control Bodies and to building occupiers.

A building control body, or the person doing the work if registered with a competent person scheme, verifies that completed building work meets the requirements of the Building Regulations. We do not have any current plans for testing the performance of the cavity wall insulation in new build homes.