Possible fraudulent EPC provided by landlord - what can we do?

lucyt87

Oh and changing energy suppliers to the lowest tariff I could and paying to install our own heaters a third of the cost to run, did very little to reduce our electricity bills because the space is just impossible to heat. A builder who looked at the place said external wall insulation wouldn’t help much either, it’s mostly because the ceiling height. 

davidmcn

lucyt87 said:

Under law you cannot assume without evidence

I'm not sure what you mean by this - the whole point of assumptions is that you've made them where you are unable to verify what the actual position is. An EPC survey isn't going to include e.g. making holes in floors / walls to check what insulation is there, so they have to make a (hopefully educated) guess, and say that they have done so.

Cakeguts

Just to put this in context. When I was a child we would get ice on the inside of the windows in our bedrooms in the winter. (No central heating, single glazing) it follows that our mother got pregnant and lived in a house where there was ice on the inside of the windows in the morning. 

What you do you wear more clothes in more layers and if you want to be green you wear wool not something modern fashionable and thin.

FreeBear

lucyt87 said:  - it would assumed there is none [insulation] which the original EPC did, but they deliberately hid this EPC from the public. 6 months later an assumption was changed so the property suddenly became rentable ? With no building works?

You could commission your own EPC and make sure it is publicly available. Whilst it won't help you right now, it could possibly be useful to someone else considering the property.

greatcrested

If it is compensation you ar seeking, you will have an uphill struggle.

Grumpelstiltskin

I slept for 23 years in a bedroom that had no access to any form of heating and single glazed windows with very thin curtains..
Downstairs there was an open fire and in the front room ( used only on high days and holidays ) a 2 bar electric fire.
I survived and I am still here 50 years later.
Surely you realised high ceilings meant more heating required?

lucyt87

Yes my mother had to sit next to a tiny heater in several layers in an icy apartment when she had me. That was in the 1980’s and pretty common then. What has that got to do with the laws and regulations around EPC’s today? The housing guidelines cover minimum temperatures and health hazards, and the EPC is a legal document on which financial decisions and laws are made, hence why you can’t rent out properties E or beneath.  

If it’s clear there is no insulation he can’t say it’s assumed without building works or evidence to back it up, especially if such an assumption was the deciding factor that changed the status of a flat from non-rentable to rentable. It’s in the fine print but it’s summarised on this website (apparently I haven’t been here long enough to post links); 

“Assessors have been prosecuted by purchasers who discovered that information included in the EPC was incorrect. Documentary evidence must therefore be such that if presented in court, it proves categorically, why the assessor entered the information.

Very often a Building Regulations “sign off certificate” is sufficient, provided that it is specific to the relevant information. The address on the certificate must match that on the EPC. A letter from the contractor who undertook any type of work will suffice. This must be on the contractor’s headed notepaper, with the date the work was carried out, the property address and a detailed description of the work involved. This must then be signed with the contractor’s position in the company noted. Photos can also be submitted as evidence, provided they are referenced. For example, photos of internal wall insulation fitted by the homeowner is perfectly acceptable provided every newly insulated wall has been photographed and can be identified using a reference point. A single photo of one wall having insulation fitted is not enough evidence to state that every exterior wall in the house has been insulated.

Assessors cannot and will not make assumptions, on areas which cannot be seen or proved, for two reasons: one, when “audited” the assessor would lose their licence, two, the assessor could be taken to court by the new owner in the event that the assessor’s assumptions had proved to be incorrect.”

AdrianC

lucyt87 said:

...paying around to £400 a month in electricity bills.

Which you could have virtually halved by changing tariff earlier to one of the market cheapest, going by the details in your other post.

I’m looking for some kind of compensation.

There's a surprise.

Step 1. Mitigate your own losses.

NewShadow

lucyt87 said:
The housing guidelines cover minimum temperatures and health hazards...

And yet, guidelines are neither legislation nor regulation, and therefore the guidelines do not make the landlord liable for how much electricity you have to use - or how much that electricity costs - to maintain a property's temperature...

AdrianC said:

I’m looking for some kind of compensation.

There's a surprise.

Step 1. Mitigate your own losses.

AND prove the assumptions made were not 'reasonable' - possibly by getting a third EPC carried out at your expense; 
THEN prove the landlord was unreasonable to believe the rating/there was collusion...

Or just move on with your life - given the stress of a newborn and a court case aren't exactly complementary...  

lucyt87

The lower tariff made little difference to our electricity bills, as I’ve already stated. The original energy supplier warned me that would be the case. 

Look I’ve had a few helpful advices on this forum, but mostly it’s just become more apparent than ever that England needed some sort of Revolution like the French, and why Monty Python constantly took the !!!!!! out of English people boasting and comparing with each other about who had it worse off. I am not interested what other people are willing to put up now or 50 years ago, and I am not here saying I’ve had it worse than anyone else and I’m suffering - I’m here trying to defend my rights by property regulations TODAY and hoped to get advice on the best course of action. I thought that’s why a forum like this existed. 

I will be getting our own EPC and bringing this up with the previous assessor and the landlord. Never mentioned anything about court.