Dr. Ciaran Byrne:

As the Deputy mentioned, we are at economic full employment and that is a significant challenge. On our warmer homes scheme, one of the more significant schemes, we ran a tender competition. We brought more contractors onto that scheme and within that scheme we also made it easier for existing contractors on a panel to subcontract works. On our individual contractors scheme, the better energy homes scheme, we have 1,350 contractors and we saw in the region of 400 contractors join the panel last year. What we are seeing in the industry, from a contractor perspective, is that more and more are pivoting towards retrofit but underneath that layer, getting individual workers is a difficulty. Our colleagues in the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science have done a significant amount of work on setting up nearly zero energy building, NZEB, training courses. There are six education and training board, ETB, centres of excellence, two of which have a particular focus on short-course vocational programmes to support retrofit. As was mentioned earlier, we have about 5,000 employees in the sector but we need to ramp that up to approximately 17,000 and probably more than that.

We are working closely with our colleagues in SOLAS and the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science in relation to traineeships and apprentices.