Q. What is the current situation as far as Energy Performance Certificates is concerned?

A. A new consumer-friendly version of the EPC, together with new rules governing their use, came into force, bizarrely enough, on Good Friday, April 6th. By law, the new 4-page EPC must now be commissioned and made available within 7 days of a property being offered for sale or rent – with an extra 21 days allowed if any particular problems are encountered with its production.

Anyone (the owner, landlord or their agent) failing to make an EPC available, free of charge, to prospective purchasers or tenants within that time frame can be reported to local Trading Standards and may be liable to pay a fixed penalty of £200.

In addition, the front page of the EPC – the bit containing the familiar bar chart and key advice on increasing energy efficiency - must now be attached to all estate agents’ particulars. Moreover, the National EPC Register, which already contains several million certificates, has for the first time been made publicly available, with the aim of making it easier for people to compare the energy efficiency of their own homes with other, similar properties.

In announcing the changes, Communities and Local Government Minister Andrew Stunell said that the package of measures would make energy information on properties easier to understand, and help people save money on their fuel bills.

So far, so good, except for the fact that estate agents have been told by Landmark – the Daily Mail-owned private company running the EPC database – that the ability to automatically extract the front page of each report and attach it to property details (as required by the new law) won’t actually be available until June!

OK, so that is the agent’s problem, you might think – and you’d be right. However, homeowners might be rather more concerned to discover that thanks to these same changes, their full address and post code will now be publicly available on the Register. Something which, in extolling the virtues of the new arrangements, Mr Stunell somehow neglected to mention…

Ultimately, of course, the question that really matters is whether any of these changes will make EPCs more useful than they have so far proved – and so far, there is precious little evidence to suggest that buyers actually care very much about them at all.

Still, anything that saves the planet has got to be worth doing – hasn’t it?