20 Skyline | Edition 8 | Winter 2025

Colin Calder

Co-founder and CEO Digital Buildings

The context: energy, comfort, and value are converging

Over the next decade, the UK’ s housing stock is expected to see a steady shift toward lower-carbon heating, better insulation, and smarter building controls. Policy has zig-zagged at times, but three durable forces remain: energy price volatility; tenant and buyer demand for warmer, healthier, cheaper-to-run homes; and growing lender interest in energy performance risk( mortgage affordability and resale attractiveness).

For landlords in particular, this is no longer a‘ nice to have’. The UK’ s Private Rented Sector( PRS) still includes many hard-to-heat homes; fuel poverty is over-represented here, which keeps reform high on the policy agenda. The Committee on Fuel Poverty’ s 2025 update emphasises raising Private Rented Sector( PRS) standards because 24 % of PRS households meet the LILEE( 1) fuel-poverty metric, accounting for 35 % of all fuel-poor households( 2). That places PRS homes in the spotlight for future minimum-standard tightening, even if the exact dates and thresholds move.