Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether his Department has made an assessment of the potential merits of basing the Energy Performance Certificate System on the carbon output of a boiler.

Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) use Energy Efficiency Rating (EER) as their headline metric, to score the energy performance of buildings based on their estimated running costs. EPCs also produce an Environmental Impact Rating (EIR) based on the estimated CO₂e emissions of the building.

Recent consultations on policies that use EPCs, eg Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards in the private rented sector, sought views on alternative metric options, such as using EIR alongside the EER, to encourage property owners to decarbonise their buildings. The Government is considering a response and will publish in due course.