ACT looks to expand rental standards for energy efficiency

The ACT Government announced consultation on the expansion of minimum standards for energy efficiency, after introducing a provision that rental homes in the ACT require ceiling insulation in April 2023. The ACT is now giving consideration to extending mandated provisions to included draught sealing, heating and cooling, and replacing out gas appliances with energy efficient electric appliances.

Renew strongly supports setting minimum standards for rental properties as a way to incentivise home improvements that ensure homes are safe and comfortable to live in. Rental standards for energy efficiency have been slow to come to fruition across Australia, but there has been recent progress in some jurisdictions, and we look forward to consideration of energy efficiency standards for rentals across all jurisdictions. With changes predicted in our climate, as outlined in this Renew / Sweltering Cities report, even homes that have high energy efficiency ratings now won’t necessarily perform adequately into future decades. It’s imperative that we find ways to drive improvements across all of Australia’s housing stock, and rental properties are a large proportion of those.

In our submission, we recommended that the ACT Government proceed with requirements for small upgrades such as fly screens on windows and draught sealing, to help renters manage ventilation better, and keep homes warm in winter. We also support more substantiation requirements such as energy efficient cooling and ensuring standards mirrored the phase-out of gas appliances that will happen across the ACT, to ensure that renters aren’t left behind. To incentivise that gas transition, we recommended that the cost of gas connections should sit with landlords, much in same way as happens with water.

Finally, given that the suite of energy efficiency requirements is becoming more comprehensive, and that the residential sector is heading towards of a national framework for home energy ratings disclosure, we recommended that the ACT should plan for future measures to integrate performance-based home energy efficiency ratings into minimum energy efficiency standards for renters. A ‘performance-based’ approach would require a minimum energy efficiency rating below which a house couldn’t not be leased, using an agreed ratings system. 

Alignment between rental standards and the the mandatory disclosure scheme, using NatHERS whole-of-home ratings, or other consistently applied ratings frameworks, could support renters to access energy ratings and ensure that newly leased homes would undergo an energy assessment, providing clear information to renters and allow for the assessment of existing features that are difficult for renters to verify alone.