Rishi Sunak scrapped energy efficiency targets to avoid a mass exodus of landlords in the private housing sector, an energy minister has revealed.
In his controversial net zero speech last month, the prime minister rowed back on targets which were aimed at making rented properties more energy efficiency. This included a requirement for all landlords to upgrade their properties to meet the EPC (Energy Performance Certificate) Band C standard.
The prime minister also disbanded the energy efficiency taskforce, which was set up just six months ago.
Energy efficiency minister Lord Callanan has now revealed that fears of a landlord backlash sparked the move.
Speaking at a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference on Monday, Lord Callanan said that the “clincher” for the decision was the shrinking pool of rented properties available that he saw while touring England to oversee the roll out of the government’s programmes.
“There’s a lot of landlords already exiting the sector for a variety of reasons,” he said, citing recent tax changes and interest rate rises amongst the off-putting factors for landlords.
“Every housing officer in the country will tell you they are getting hundreds of families presented themselves as homeless because the landlords have decided it’s not worth it anymore and many are exiting the sector and selling properties.”
These concerns were especially pronounced in rural areas where there are a lot of stone-built properties that are very hard to upgrade.
He added that improvements that would be “pretty insignificant” for landlords in London are “significant” in northern areas, like his north-east home region, where rents and property prices are much lower.
Lord Callanan added: “We decided that we did not need any more properties leaving the private rented sector and the implications of that for what are already shortages. It’s one of these policy dilemmas that you have to deal with and that’s the way we decided to go.”
He added, however, that the government is looking at reforming the stamp duty to provide households with incentives to upgrade the energy efficiency of their homes when moving house, the peer hinted.
He said: “There’s a lot you can do with stamp duty to design a system that is effectively cost neutral and will provide some incentive for people to improve the energy efficiency of their property.”
Lord Callanan also said he is “increasingly suspicious” of the concept of citizen assemblies, which are increasing touted as a way of helping governments to make decisions on far reaching and long-term issues like climate change.
Local authorities and MPs are elected to take such decisions, he said: “That’s the way democracy works in the UK.”
Parliament’s select committees banded together in 2020, before the Covid-19 pandemic, to hold a citizen’s assembly to map forward ways for the UK to meet its 2050 net zero emissions target. The assemblies are made up of individuals, selected to reflect the make-up of the broader population, to consider solutions to thorny policy problems that stretch beyond Parliamentary terms.