The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has disclosed, in a letter dated 19 January 2024, that it has recorded a total of 17,455 opted out Energy Performance Certificates in its energy performance registers for England and Wales.
DLUHC notes that the total of 17,455 "does not equate to the same numbers of buildings that have opted out; one building can have many opt-outs applied to it."
EPC information is normally accessible to the public via the Find an energy certificate service on GOV.UK or as bulk data from epc.opendatacommunities.org.
According to DLUHC statistics, the EPC registers for England and Wales included 27,018,535 lodgements for domestic properties and 1,337,893 lodgements for non-domestic properties as at the end of 2023. Certificates with opt-outs are apparently excluded from the statistics.
The total number of opt-outs was disclosed following an information request that I submitted to DLUHC in December 2023.
You can download the correspondence: FOI_IR2024_01899.zip (0.4 MB zipped)
I asked for a breakdown of the 17,455 opt-out applications by year, but DLUHC claimed not to hold that information.
I also asked for a list of property addresses for which EPCs are not currently publicly disclosed, with the lodgement dates for each – or, alternatively, a list of the postcode districts for each property with the lodgement dates.
In its initial response, DLUHC handled my request under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 and claimed this information was exempt "by virtue of regulation 13, as its disclosure would breach one or more of the data protection principles in the Data Protection Act (DPA)."
In its internal review response, DLUHC conceded that it should have handled my request under the Freedom of Information Act. But it maintained that the additional information was exempt from disclosure under Section 44 (1)(a), which exempts information if its disclosure is prohibited under any enactment, because The Energy Performance of Buildings (England and Wales) Regulations 2012 "only allows the keeper of the register (the DLUHC SoS) to disclose data collected under the regulations in certain circumstances which are set out in regulations 30-32."
The prerogative to opt out of public disclosure of EPC information is offered to property owners and occupants in England and Wales.
In Northern Ireland, energy assessors can opt out properties on behalf of their clients. It's unclear whether opt outs for Northern Ireland can also be made subsequently via DLUHC's helpdesk.
The Scottish Government no longer offers an opt out for its EPC registers, following advice from the Information Commissioner's Office.