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

To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have, if any, to introduce mandatory energy performance testing for new homes.

We are committed to ensuring that good quality homes are built which meet the energy efficiency standards they were designed to. That is why, as part of the Future Homes and Buildings Standards consultation, we are consulting on introducing a post-occupancy fabric performance testing scheme for new homes.

We are proposing that developers opt-in to performance testing a proportion of their new homes. This would enable us to gather better data on how significantly new homes are underperforming.

We envisage that many developers will opt-in to the performance testing scheme and have been encouraged by work some developers are already doing to monitor and improve the actual performance of their homes.