Social Housing Providers
All East Midlands Domestic Energy Alliance assessors are fully accredited, trained and practiced in the production of EPCs for social housing.
Councils, registered landlords and housing associations should contact EMDEA for further information or to arrange an appointment to discuss you particular requirements.
Our DEAs are accredited with Elmhurst Energy Systems, Quidos and BRE.
Background information
All social housing, being housing for rent provided by the state/government, semi-independent (not-for-profit) housing providers known as Housing Associations (HA) or more recently, Registered Social Landlords (RSL), is required to have an EPC under European law.
For a DEA to use sampling and cloning to produce EPC for social housing providers they must have completed appropriate Continuous Professional Development (CPD) to demonstrate their understanding and competence.
Accreditation Schemes are required to implement appropriate CPD programmes.
Historically, public housing was known as council housing and was provided solely by Local Authorities (LAs), for example city, district and borough councils. As described above, there are now multiple housing providers in the social housing sector including RSLs (Registered Social Landlords), ALMOs (Arms Length Management Organisations) and TMOs (Tenant Management Organisations).
Council housing was previously accessible to all. With Right to Buy (the selling of properties to tenants) and the reduction in the building of new council houses, the supply of properties declined. This resulted in the need to ration the remaining properties to those residents in the greatest need. With the shift in management style from a contractual role to a social welfare role, public housing has more recently been known as social housing.
Residential property types will vary between housing organisations but are likely to include:
- Flats
- Low rise
- Medium rise
- High rise
- Purpose built
- Conversion
- Houses
- Terraced
- Semi-detached
- Detached
- Maisonettes
- Bungalows
- Pre-fabricated
- Caravans (and caravan plots)
- Mixed use developments, i.e. flats above shops.
Non-residential property types are likely to include:
- Garages
- Shops
- Other commercial properties
Sampling
Sampling is the process of selecting units from a population of interest so that by surveying the sample one can fairly generalise the results and apply them to the production of EPCs for similar dwellings in the population from which they were chosen.
Once presented with one or more coherent groups of properties, the DEA is responsible for selecting a sample of properties from that group; undertaking inspections for each sampled property and using the results of that exercise to determine whether the group is indeed coherent, so that cloning is appropriate. If cloning is not appropriate, either further sub-division of the group is required by the social housing provider or the entire group will need to be inspected.
The advantages of sampling are generally appreciated and include:
- Time savings
- Cost savings
- Environmental responsibility
All EPCs have the same legal status, whether they are produced from an individual inspection or through cloning. Users of the EPC therefore enjoy the same legal rights and protection.
Accreditation schemes are therefore responsible for ensuring that the EPC produced by their members are of sufficient quality.
Accreditation schemes are initially responsible for ensuring that any DEA undertaking sampling and cloning is competent to do so. This is expected to be achieved through individuals undertaking appropriate continuous professional development (CPD) process.
Accreditation schemes will monitor the application of this process through their quality monitoring process.
It is important to note that decisions on how many properties to sample within these batches will be made by individual DEAs - not social landlords or other external parties. It is thus essential that consistent principles are established at the outset and applied by all DEAs
Accreditation Schemes will expect the DEA to produce evidence of his part of the sampling process. In addition to the record of inspection and photographs for the assessed properties, the accreditation scheme will expect the following information to be appropriately documented:
- The schedule of properties sent to them by the Social Housing provider
- A calculation to show how the DEA calculated the number of properties to sample and which specific addresses
- The results of each of the EPC samples generated
- Comparison of these results with the specified tolerance range for cloning
- How the DEA selected the EPC to be cloned.
