When your record shows an energy performance certificate as confirmed, it means we found it on the official register and the details matched. Not that somebody typed the number in correctly.
Where that works
The EPC platform we search covers England and Wales. For a property there, a certificate can be confirmed at source and marked as such, and only when it genuinely matched.
That distinction does real work. A confirmed certificate is a fact a lender or a buyer can rely on. An unconfirmed one is a claim, and the record says which it is.
Where it does not
Scotland has its own register, and there is no official API for it. The quarterly extract carries a licence restriction on exactly the address fields you would need for matching, and the only live third-party API redistributes those same fields without, as far as we can tell, the right to do so.
So for Scottish properties we do not check. We link to the official Scottish EPC register so you can look it up yourself, and the record says the check was not performed rather than showing a blank that looks like a pass.
Northern Ireland is signposted the same way.
Why say all this out loud
Because "we verify EPCs" is the kind of sentence that is true in most cases and misleading in the rest, and the rest are the cases where somebody gets hurt.
A record that quietly stops checking at the border, without saying so, is worse than one that never checked at all. At least the second is not implying anything.
The documents section of the sample record at tradelynx.co.uk/demo/homelynx-passport shows how a confirmed certificate is presented, on sample data.