Camden has London's lowest rate of EPC-certificate coverage for houses: just 58.4% of its roughly 9,100 house addresses have ever had an energy certificate logged. It also sits third from bottom on flats, at 11.4%. That combination matters, because it overturns a pattern that has held in every other English city region tested so far.
In Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, the borough with the weakest flat-certificate coverage was the same one with the strongest house coverage — Manchester and Birmingham each topped the house-coverage table while sitting at the bottom of the flat table, a "mirror" effect covered in an earlier comparison of the three conurbations. Running the identical test across London's 33 boroughs finds no such mirror. Instead, the boroughs with the weakest flat coverage overwhelmingly turn out to have weak house coverage too.
The lowest-coverage boroughs, by type
Excluding the City of London (just 87 recorded house addresses — too thin to rank), here is where flat-certificate coverage is weakest, alongside the same borough's house-coverage figure:
| Borough | Flat coverage | House coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Westminster | 6.7% (n=62,550) | 62.5% (n=7,809) |
| Kensington and Chelsea | 9.4% (n=38,316) | 66.2% (n=10,054) |
| Camden | 11.4% (n=40,717) | 58.4% (n=9,134) |
| Tower Hamlets | 14.2% (n=69,610) | 73.1% (n=7,264) |
| Hackney | 15.4% (n=35,754) | 62.9% (n=12,231) |
And here is the house-coverage ranking on its own:
| Borough | House coverage | Flat coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Camden | 58.4% (n=9,134) | 11.4% (n=40,717) |
| Westminster | 62.5% (n=7,809) | 6.7% (n=62,550) |
| Islington | 62.7% (n=10,265) | 16.4% (n=35,383) |
| Hackney | 62.9% (n=12,231) | 15.4% (n=35,754) |
| Kensington and Chelsea | 66.2% (n=10,054) | 9.4% (n=38,316) |
Four of the five weakest boroughs on flats — Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, Camden, Hackney — also appear in the five weakest on houses. In Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, the equivalent lists for the dominant core city pointed in opposite directions. In London they point the same way.
Flat and house coverage move together, not apart
Across all 32 ranked boroughs, flat-certificate coverage and house-certificate coverage have a Pearson correlation of r = 0.544 — a moderate positive relationship. Boroughs with weak flat coverage tend to have weaker-than-average house coverage as well, rather than compensating for it with a strong house-coverage figure the way Manchester and Birmingham did for their own conurbations.
The borough with the single highest house-certificate coverage, Barking and Dagenham (78.6%, n=32,298), is nowhere near the bottom of the flat table — its flat coverage (41.2%) ranks in London's top third. The lowest flat coverage belongs to Westminster, whose house coverage is itself below the London average. No single borough plays the "mirror" role that Manchester and Birmingham played elsewhere.
The gap between a borough's own house and flat coverage — a simple way to see how unevenly EPC data is distributed within one authority — still varies widely, from 22.0 percentage points in Enfield (house 70.4%, flat 48.5%) up to 58.9 points in Tower Hamlets (house 73.1%, flat 14.2%), London's widest internal split. Tower Hamlets is the one case that doesn't fit the broader "low coverage clusters together" pattern: despite having London's third-lowest flat coverage, its house coverage sits comfortably above the citywide average. Whether that's driven by a specific slice of its housing stock turning over more often is a question the borough-level figures here can't answer on their own.
What coverage actually measures
An EPC certificate is only generated when a home is sold, let, or newly built (gov.uk guidance) — there's no requirement to certify a property that simply sits in continuous owner-occupation. So a low coverage rate is a signal about how often a borough's housing stock changes hands or enters the rental market, not a signal about energy efficiency, exclusivity, or property values. Reading Camden's or Westminster's low figures as evidence of inefficient homes, or their inhabitants' housing choices, would be the wrong conclusion — the data says nothing about the condition of the roughly three in ten houses and three in four flats citywide that have simply never had reason to be certified.
Citywide, London's 1,035,546 flat addresses and 1,068,843 house addresses have a combined 996,347 EPC certificates logged between them (23.4% of flats, 70.6% of houses) — both below the England & Wales averages found when this coverage measure was first run nationally. Based on 2.1 million Land Registry addresses and EPC register certificates (fetched 23 October 2026), every figure in this piece is a live count, not a modelled estimate; see the full borough-by-borough EPC coverage table for the complete 33-borough breakdown and the Manchester/Birmingham/Leeds comparison this piece tests against.
Looking up your own street shows whether its EPC record is current. Try the Homecost postcode tool for Westminster (SW1A 1AA) — or any London postcode — to see the recorded energy rating alongside the true cost of buying there. Browse more Cost Intelligence guides for the rest of this series.