Research and analysis

Energy Performance of Buildings Certificates in England and Wales: user research

Published 17 May 2022

Applies to England and Wales

Background

The Department for Levelling up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) currently publish data on Energy Performance for Buildings Certificates (EPCs) in 3 formats:

• Quarterly statistics
• Weekly statistics
• Open Data

As part of our commitment to continue to meet user needs the Department for Levelling up, Housing and Communities carried out user research to involve users in the ongoing development of the statistics and open data.

The approach

Seven users were interviewed remotely and asked a range of open questions about the quarterly and weekly statistics, and the EPC data published on the open data communities website. The following is a summation of their feedback.

Dashboards and stats releases

Opinion on dashboards and stats releases are split between user types. Users who need to create communications quickly, find them useful whereas data experts prefer to look at the raw data and create their own conclusions.

Sample quotes

• “We have a team of analysts who work in SQL which feeds into our dashboards.”
• “We produce tableau dashboards with trends and comparisons to other areas.”
• “I’m always very much interested in the raw data and you know things like pre created power BI or with Tableau type dashboards aren’t particularly useful to me”
• “We like to get the statistical releases as we use them to create briefings for our ministers”

Address

Most users see addresses as a way to link data and the introduction of adding UPRNs to the open data was welcomed. Being able to confirm that properties belong in a specific area is more useful to help with outcomes.

Sample quotes

• “Having UPRNs on the data sets would be really beneficial, I do a lot of work trying to match across data sets.”
• “Most of my day is ingesting data and matching the UPRN for analysts to work with.”
• “Addresses are important to us; we don’t use single postcodes, but district level is useful. Local authority aggregates are useful.”
• “I’m always quite cautious of using addresses within the terms on the EPC. You can use the address if it is for purposes of monitoring the energy efficiency of the housing stocks. Ultimately, I want to use it to create price per square meter data.”

Frequency

Users are generally happy with the frequency of the releases. There may be some merit in future of being able to compare monthly data as the data is used in more interesting ways.

Sample quotes

• “The frequency is fine as we have a lot of work to do with the data and other data sets we get are only bi annual.”
• “Quarterly releases are fine for us, moving to monthly would be good but it’s still early days for us. Our dashboards update quarterly at present.”
• “The weekly stats release is the most important to us as its timely and most relevant. The regional level is a good indicator for us.”
• “The weekly data is really useful, and I hope that it’s something that continues and is not just a product of the pandemic.”

5000-line limit

When filtering data, users experience a limit of 5000 of results and so have to download all the data.

Sample quotes

• “Recently I only wanted April to June data. I filtered some options out. But once you hit over 5000 properties you only get a partial file. So, I ended up just downloading it all again.”
• “We often get into the situation where we can only see the first 5000 lines and we’re worried we are missing things.”

Presentation and format

The presentation and format are well accepted by users.

Sample quotes

• “The biggest change is the format of the live tables; they are much more usable now.”
• “Presentation and format is great.”

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Usage

The data is generally split between the following needs

• communication methods for journalist or social media posts
• comparing areas of housing to help understanding of possible improvements
• gathering data on rating and floor area to create price per metre data
• to enable up to date calculation of the carbon score

Sample quotes

• “We recalculate the carbon measurement shown on the EPC so that we can see the latest score, because carbon intensities change every year. The score that was calculated five years ago, even with nothing done to the property isn’t necessarily the score today.”
• “Any measures we create are determined by the square metre of the property. Price per metre is the most important metric for us.”
• “We want to get the maximum benefit from the data by giving our team the evidence as to where to concentrate their efforts.”
• “We model our data so that we get the best benefit out of any retrofits, etc that we do so that we’re applying them in the right area.”
• “The most useful data is the current EPC, its potential and the floor area.”

Remodelling

This is split between users who link straight to DLUHC data and others who create their own outputs, dependant on their requirements. (Housing Association or Business)

Sample quotes

• “I’ll create some content either for Twitter or my website.”
• “If you’re a data person, part of your accepted workflow is the fact that you’re going to have to be doing data tidying and manipulation in order to get it into the format that you need to do.”

Impact

The use of interviews has allowed DLUHC to gain feedback and insight from users on their priorities and interests. Within the EPC open data DLUHC now publish UPRNs attached to addresses and the API used to access the data will soon have a UPRN search capability. The weekly and quarterly statistics will continue to be published, with a dashboard to provide more accessibility to the data underlying the live tables.