{"id":226,"date":"2025-10-03T06:01:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T05:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/?p=226"},"modified":"2025-09-30T18:17:33","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T17:17:33","slug":"manifestos-and-mees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/manifestos-and-mees\/","title":{"rendered":"Manifestos and MEES"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There has been quite a lot of peripheral but really important stuff going on this week, including one bit that I missed previously.\u00a0 So, there are three posts this week, of which this is the first.<\/p>\n<p>This is the one that I missed.\u00a0 The party wonks will be sharpening their pens for their manifestos and we will want to examine them carefully when they come out.\u00a0 However, other organisations are seeking to influence those manifestos.\u00a0 One of those is the National Residential Landlords Association.\u00a0 While some landlord groups can be, frankly, a little &#8220;out there&#8221;, the NRLA tend to be at the more reasonable end of the spectrum.\u00a0 They want to develop their <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nrla.org.uk\/news\/have-your-say-welsh-prs\">own Manifesto<\/a> to lobby candidates and parties.\u00a0 They are suggesting that something like these could be the issues:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Building safety and fire regulations<\/li>\n<li>Energy efficiency and planning reform<\/li>\n<li>Increasing housing supply<\/li>\n<li>Tackling enforcement of rogue landlords, or<\/li>\n<li>Taxation and financial viability of letting<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One other matter they consider is getting Wales ready for the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES).\u00a0 MEES has been talked about as an issue for a while and is going to be a particularly significant issue in Wales with a large proportion of properties coming in at below EPC rating of C.\u00a0 That is an issue because of the lawfulness of renting property below the C threshold in the future.\u00a0 Now, we may be anxious about EPC assessments (I had one done on my place a couple of years ago, and was a bit shocked by the assessment process), but that is what is governing MEES and there are a significant proportion of PRS properties in Wales below the C threshold.\u00a0 I checked the NRLA stat and found that they are correct: just under 60% of PRS properties in Wales <a href=\"https:\/\/rentsmart.gov.wales\/en\/energyperformance\/\">registered with RentSmart Wales<\/a> are at D and below.\u00a0 But, of course, there are geographical variations.\u00a0 Anglesey, for example has almost 80% at D and below; and Cardiff at around 40%.\u00a0 This does not take account of properties which are said to be exempt from MEES (but my sense is that is a bit of a self-certification process and may not be correct, but we can certainly discuss that).\u00a0 The bottom line is that this looks like it will be a major issue going forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There has been quite a lot of peripheral but really important stuff going on this week, including one bit that I missed previously.\u00a0 So, there are three posts this week, [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":7123,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private-renting"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7123"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":227,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions\/227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}