Britain's coldest rented homes belong to its most famous landlords

The landlords everyone knows, the homes nobody sees

More than 100 homes on the inherited royal estates of King Charles and Prince William fail the legal minimum energy standard for landlords, a Guardian investigation found [1]. The Guardian sampled lets on the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall and the Sandringham estate. One in five carried an Energy Performance Certificate rating of F or G [1]. An EPC is a simple efficiency score for a property, A at the top and G at the bottom, meant to signal running costs and emissions [1].

Since 2020 it has been illegal in England and Wales to rent a home rated below E unless the landlord registers an exemption [1]. Fewer than one in 12 of the failing royal properties had one on record [1]. The Duchy of Lancaster had logged exemptions for eight homes, the Duchy of Cornwall four, Sandringham five [1]. Reporters visited some of the worst-rated properties and found black mould and draughty single glazing [1]. Some older tenancies fall outside the rules entirely, and house elderly tenants relying on coal fires or electric heaters [1].

The money is not the constraint. The two duchies are exempt from most business taxes and have paid more than 400 million pounds to the king and his family since 2018 [1]. The Duchy of Cornwall runs profit margins of about 60% and pays over 20 million pounds a year to the monarch’s eldest son [3]. One tenant, in failing health and heating a mostly uninsulated home with coal stoves, put it plainly: “It’s archaic” [3]. The duchy says its portfolio holds many historic buildings in isolated rural and island locations, and that it has a retrofit programme [3]. It says 50 million pounds is planned for the condition and efficiency of existing homes, on top of a previously announced 500 million pound investment [3]. It says it has spent 11 million pounds on home improvements since 2022 [3].

The deadline is moving. The government has said landlords will need to reach EPC C or better by 2030, up from E [2]. The Guardian examined more than 700 domestic certificates across the three estates and found 630 would fail that bar [2]. Ninety-nine per cent of Sandringham’s rentals were D or lower, more than 90% at Lancaster, about 80% at Cornwall [2]. Upgrading could cost up to 10,000 pounds per property, with fines up to 30,000 pounds for each home still let without the work [2]. Nationally, just over half of all rental homes sit below C [2]. The government says the plan could lift up to half a million households out of fuel poverty by 2030 [2].

The cheapest cut in America is a tyre

On Monday the California Energy Commission unanimously approved the first replacement-tyre efficiency standards in the United States [4]. Carmakers fit low-rolling-resistance tyres to hit fuel-economy targets, but replacements are often worse, so cars quietly burn more fuel over their remaining life [4]. Buyers cannot tell. “It is very difficult or impossible for consumers to know how energy efficient their tires are going to be,” said Brian Fadie of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project [4].

The state projects the rule will cut carbon dioxide by 2 million tons a year, which it likens to taking about 400,000 cars off the road [4]. It also projects savings of roughly 1 billion dollars a year at the pump [4]. A “leaf” label will rate tyres so buyers can see what they are getting [4]. The standards phase in from 2029 and tighten in 2033, a longer runway than first proposed after manufacturers asked for time [4]. Snow and competition tyres are exempt; all-weather tyres are excluded for now but will be tracked [4].

That is a cut that pays for itself, and it took a state regulator to claim it, because no single driver could.

Where the argument actually happens

Almost none of the week’s political heat landed near those cuts. Reform UK, which took Essex County Council in May pledging to ditch “net stupid zero”, scrapped the council’s net-zero and greenhouse-gas policies [8]. The administration says that saves nearly 3 million pounds over four years, mostly 2.3 million in staff costs [8]. Liberal Democrat Stephen Robinson argues redundancy payments and lost grant income will eat the saving; the council’s own report does not state severance costs [8].

In Canada, the country’s biggest oil producers are targeting late 2027 for a final decision on the Pathways carbon capture project, Oil Sands Alliance president Kendall Dilling told Reuters [9]. The plan would cut 6 million tonnes by the mid-2030s and a further 10 million by 2045 [9]. Fiscal terms with Alberta and the federal government are expected by mid-November [9]. It is a multi-billion-dollar scheme, and the decision is still more than a year away [9].

In Ukraine, the steelmaker Zaporizhstal now faces EU carbon tariffs and quotas alongside Russian missiles [10]. New EU rules from 1 July cut tariff-free import quotas by nearly half and put a 50% duty on out-of-quota steel [10]. Ukraine’s new quota of about 1 million tonnes is a 60% cut on 2025 volumes, according to the Kyiv consultancy GMK Center [10]. Steel is 15% of Ukraine’s exports and the EU takes around four-fifths of it [10]. A Russian strike on the plant on Tuesday killed seven workers [10].

Cities are quietly betting on the expensive end too. A Nature Climate Change study of 103 European cities aiming at net zero by 2030 found 61.4 million tonnes of leftover emissions, mostly from buildings and transport [11]. Every municipal strategy leans on temporary land-based carbon removal; 40% lean on carbon credits and 32% on permanent removal [11]. The authors rate the maturity of these plans medium-low, and note that quantified estimates cover only 18% of those leftover emissions [11]. The Science Based Targets initiative, the main corporate net-zero standard-setter, updated its rules this month [12]. Large firms in its recognition programme must support carbon removals from 2035, but supply-chain targets are no longer mandatory, which some read as dilution [12].

Why the boring cuts go unclaimed

Three things this week explain the gap.

The first is who pays. A landlord funds the insulation; the tenant banks the lower bill. That split is exactly why the royal estates’ worst homes stayed cold while the estates stayed profitable [1] [3].

The second is that legislators misread the room. A survey of 100 sitting UK MPs, published this week in Communications Sustainability, compared their guesses about public support for four climate policies against national polling [13]. MPs underestimated support by 11 percentage points on average, and still did so when the personal cost was spelled out [13]. They also overestimated how split voters were [13]. MPs who thought support was lower were less willing to speak for a pricing policy [13]. Showing them the real polling helped only a little [13].

The third is delivery. In Cambridgeshire, councils used up their 3.5 million pound Warm Homes grant after helping 245 homes and have written to ask for more [5]. David Brain of Wisbech got solar panels and says his electricity bill is now 2p a day, though he assumed the offer was a scam until it was finished [5]. Trevor Dewey, waiting on a boiler and panels, was told the money had run out [5]. A cut can be cheap and still not happen if nobody can find the door.

Cost itself is not fixed either. A heat pump runs about 10,000 pounds in the UK before grants, against roughly 2,500 for a gas boiler [6]. The same machine costs twice as much in one country as another, because of labour costs, tax and a shortage of installers [6]. Buildings use 40% of Europe’s energy [6]. And a low bill is not the same as affordable energy: households often hold heating and cooling at uncomfortable settings to keep the number down [7].

The under-covered one: the battery in the driveway

California’s grid batteries grew 2,100% between 2019 and 2025 [14]. A new report from GridLab, Kevala and E3 points at a store the state already owns. If one in ten Californian EV owners let their cars feed power back by 2036, they would supply a third of the state’s long-duration storage target [14]. “It won’t take a huge amount of participation to make a meaningful dent in what would otherwise be very expensive grid-scale storage purchases,” said Kevala’s Pete Skala [14].

The wider system keeps moving faster than the argument. Global installed solar passed 3 terawatts, with the third terawatt added in under two years against ten years for the first [17]. Lazard puts new utility-scale solar at 38 to 78 dollars per megawatt-hour, against 48 to 109 for new gas [18]. US solar also outran coal’s monthly share for the first time in May [18]. India’s clean installed capacity reached 331.7 GW against 302.0 GW of fossil, a first, though coal still supplies about 70% of the electricity actually generated [19]. Europe’s wind and solar are on course to beat gas-fired output for the longest run on record this year [15].

The frictions are physical, not ideological. China turned away 360 terawatt-hours of clean power in the first half of 2026, up 49%, because grids ran out of room [16]. Next-generation geothermal could deliver hundreds of gigawatts around the clock, but stands at 4 GW nationwide in the US [20]. A new report argues states need targeted policy for it to scale [20]. In Alabama, at least a dozen proposed data centres would together draw more power than every home in the state [21]. The regulator’s new public-interest test starts on 1 October [21]. Reuters reports that most of Europe’s weather losses are uninsured, so the bill lands on public budgets, with an EU resilience plan due [22].

Two studies fill in the design side. Nature Energy tested a carbon tax and an information campaign across Mexico, South Africa, the US and the UK [23]. The two competed for attention but added up in individual choices, and combining them raised public support more than a tax alone [23]. And a US mapping study using kilometre-resolution emissions data found denser neighbourhoods are consistently associated with lower emissions per person [24]. Local road design was a strong negative predictor of transport emissions [24]. Meanwhile Europe’s heat is lifting demand for cooling and heat pumps while solar module sales sit flat, partly because buyers pulled purchases forward [25].