The short answer is no, not for incumbent tenants. Suppose your property has 140 rent points and you actually need 145 to get into the free sector. You are afraid that your tenants will object to the rent at the Rent Commission, so you come up with a ruse. You want to earn more rental points by getting a better energy label. After all, the better the energy label, the more rental points you get.
That’s why you decide to quickly install a new central heating boiler and then immediately invite an EPA consultant to make a new energy label. It works. You go from a D to a C label and this gives you (in this example) enough rental points to get into the free sector. Indeed, the tenants object to the amount of rent and you proudly wave your new rent point count and new energy label.
Again, this will surprise you, but the Rent Commission is not going to rule in your favor. The reason is that the Rent Commission looks at the number of rent points at the start of the lease. Your new energy label will not be counted in the Rent Commission’s rental point test, because it was not there when the lease started. The rent assessment commission then takes your old energy label and arrives at too few points for the free sector. The consequence: you as landlord must keep the rent that the rent commission has calculated and retroactively pay back the overpaid rent to the tenants.