County Durham EPC Fuel Poverty Risk

EPC-led fuel poverty risk analysis for County Durham using property energy performance data, local fuel poverty statistics, domestic electricity and gas consumption, and deprivation indicators.

Project contents

• notebooks/03_epc_data_clean.ipynb
  Pulls and prepares EPC data for County Durham.
• notebooks/04_join_epc_fuel_poverty.ipynb
  Joins EPC postcode risk outputs with local authority fuel poverty data.
• notebooks/05_join_consumption_iod.ipynb
  Adds electricity, gas, and IMD/IOD contextual indicators.
• notebooks/06_final_analysis_county_durham.ipynb
  Produces final summary analysis tables.
• reports/county_durham_fuel_poverty_risk_report.docx
  Final Word report with tables, findings, and formulas.

Project aim

This project builds a postcode-level risk proxy for fuel poverty in County Durham.
The main analytical base is EPC data, and the final output combines:

• EPC-derived property efficiency indicators
• Local authority fuel poverty percentage
• Domestic electricity consumption
• Domestic gas consumption
• IMD/IOD deprivation context

Main workflow

1. Pull EPC domestic records for County Durham.
2. Keep the latest EPC per property.
3. Engineer property-level risk flags:
   • low rating
   • low efficiency
   • improvement gap
4. Aggregate to postcode level.
5. Build a composite postcode risk score.
6. Add local authority context from fuel poverty, energy consumption, and deprivation datasets.
7. Summarise and interpret the results.

Key outputs used in the report

• Full EPC rows pulled: 299,445
• Latest unique property records retained: 233,972
• Final filtered postcodes ranked: 4,429
• Highest-risk postcode in this model: DH1 5HG
• Lowest-risk postcode in this model: DL14 8FT

Data files needed

Place the required raw input files in data/raw/ before running the notebooks.

Expected files:

• fuel_poverty_la_2023.xlsx
• electricity_la_2005_2024.xlsx
• gas_la_2005_2024.xlsx
• iod2025_la_summary_v2.xlsx

Python packages

Install packages from requirements.txt.

Notes

• This is an EPC-led postcode risk proxy, not a directly observed postcode fuel poverty rate.
• Fuel poverty, electricity, gas, and IMD/IOD values are local-authority-level contextual variables in this version of the project.