Domestic and non-domestic energy performance certificates review: executive summary

Topic Analysis

The feedback from the consultations and the workshops highlighted a number of concerns around EPCs. This report has analysed the responses to the consultations and taken into account the feedback from the workshops to identify the potential actions that could be undertaken by the Scottish Government to strengthen EPCs to support the further development of EES. The possible actions, organised by the overarching topic or technical issue, are set out in Chapter 6 of the main report.

The possible actions have been divided into four categories which correspond to the four components of the EPC process:

• calculation issues
• assessment issues
• reporting issues
• database issues

The category into which an issue falls has implications for the time and cost of making any proposed changes. For example, resolving and improving calculation issues would need changes to the underlying methodologies and / or the calculation models. These models are currently within the remit of, and lead by, two UK government departments, BEIS and MHCLG. As the underlying methodologies are empirically-based, changes in SAP, RdSAP and SBEM are based on new data. If a change to the underlying methodology also requires data collectionto inform or validate the process, then that will increase the time required to make a change. Further details on these categories are set out in Chapter 3.