9th
May 2022
Generation Rent director Baroness Alicia Kennedy’s latest attack on landlords is now on insulation and cold homes.
The Baroness confidently claims that a quarter of a million of landlords have families living in their properties “that are so expensive to heat they are illegal to let out,”
She also states that renters in these homes will have to spend £321m more on energy costs this year because the properties do not meet what she calls “basic standards.”
Kennedy claims that apparently South West England is where PRS tenants will probably live in a home that falls below Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards with renter households in the region making up nine per cent of all households, whereas across England the average is 6 per cent.
Besides the usual ‘critique’ of the PRS the Baroness also slams councils for their lack of enforcement stating that just one in eight local authorities actually enforce EPC requirements.
Generation Rent tells councils to find those local private rented homes which fail the MEES requirements and make sure landlords bring them up to required standards. The Baroness and her group call for tenants to be given protection from eviction as well as being able to claim back rent.
The activist group claims that after analysing EPC data to gauge how big the problem is for each region in the country that approximately 201,000 PRS homes have F EPC ratings, 62,000 are rated as G, out of the total of 4,265,000 homes with an EPC.
According to Kennedy, London’s private tenants’ homes are least likely to be categorised under what she calls “an illegal home” with just 3.3 per cent below the minimum standards, and the North East is just slightly behind the capital with 4 per cent.
Having sent Freedom of Information requests to councils across the country, 101 authorities supplied information back to the group about how they were tackled MEES enforcement in 2020-21. Only 13 actually issued enforcement notices with a grand total of 359 and the most active council was Barnsley with 181, runner up was Bristol with 35 followed by Thanet with 30.
Generation Rent is telling councils to ‘shape up’ and start using accessible data to the public on EPCs to find those tenants having to live in cold homes, as well as ‘upping’ their enforcement powers and improvement notices to help the renters.
The Baroness says: “A quarter of a million households are in homes too cold to be legal and with energy bills through the roof, they are paying hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds more than they should as a result.
“People will miss meals, get ill, and fall into arrears as a result of their landlord’s negligence.
“Councils have the data and the powers they need to protect the most vulnerable tenants – but at the moment most are not using them.
“The government needs to act much faster to ensure that private landlords insulate their properties, including by reforming tenancies to give tenants more confidence to exercise their rights.”
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