2030 is four years away. In retrofit terms, that’s tomorrow.
By 2030, every privately rented home in England and Wales will need to meet the new Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES). Around 2.5 million rental homes currently fall below the target. That is a huge amount of work to plan, fund and deliver in a short window.
This week the sector’s biggest landlord body said the same thing, loudly. Here’s what they said, what I think it means for landlords, and what you can do about it now.
The National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA) and Energy Saving Trust have published a joint briefing calling on government to set out a clear delivery roadmap for MEES in the private rented sector. It follows a parliamentary roundtable chaired by Clive Betts MP, which brought together 12 organisations from housing, consumer protection, energy efficiency, finance and local government.
The group broadly welcomes the direction of the Warm Homes Plan and the revised approach to MEES. But its core warning is simple: with the deadline four years out, ambition won’t deliver warmer homes on its own. Government needs to explain how MEES will fit with EPC reform, exemptions, enforcement and financial support.
Alongside that roadmap, the briefing asks for five things:
The risk they highlight is the one I see every week. Without certainty, landlords hold off, and the work bunches up near the deadline. That piles pressure on installers, supply chains and enforcement later in the decade.
NRLA chief executive Ben Beadle put it well: “2030 may sound some way off”, but landlords, installers, lenders and councils need to start preparing now. When everyone leaves it to the final years, the scramble for installers, finance and advice drives costs up.
He’s right. From the conversations I have with landlords, three problems stand out.
Most landlords can’t answer two basic questions about their portfolio: what actually needs doing to each property, and what will it cost? Without those answers, it’s impossible to budget, finance or plan the work. So it gets pushed back.
Waiting feels safe, but it isn’t. Less time means scarcer capacity. When everyone rushes at once, installers get stretched, work quality drops and prices climb. The landlords who act early will pay less and get better work.
Many landlords assume the recommendations on their EPC are the route to compliance. They aren’t. Those lists aren’t designed to find the lowest-cost route, or the least disruptive route, to meeting the standard. Follow them blindly and you can spend more than you need to, and cause more upheaval for tenants than necessary.
The 2030 date isn’t going anywhere. But the capacity crunch is coming even sooner than most people think.
In my view, H2 2027 is the real soft deadline. That’s when SAP, the methodology behind today’s EPCs, is due to be replaced by the Home Energy Model (HEM). By all accounts, the new model will give landlords less choice in how they reach compliance, and higher costs to get there.
That means the window where you have the most options, at the best prices, is the next 12 to 18 months. After that, the rules shift and demand surges at the same time.
Those three problems are exactly why we built Eco Approach’s end-to-end MEES service. It answers each one directly.
The NRLA briefing calls for clearer advice, more reliable installer capacity and higher quality standards. For landlords who don’t want to wait for the system to catch up, that’s what we offer today.
If you own or manage rental properties, now is the time to get a clear plan and a fixed quote, while choice, capacity and time are still on your side.
The landlords who move first will get the best installers, the best prices and the least disruption. The ones who wait will be competing for whatever capacity is left.
Get in touch to find out where your portfolio stands.