Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I agree with Deputy Michael Moynihan that the merit of the energy efficiency drive is that it is a win-win. It reduces our consumption of energy. It leads to a reduction in our import bill, contributes to healthier living and leads to savings for the consumer. There is no doubt that given current constraints, we should be targeting money at energy efficiency measures. As the Deputy said, the Government has provided aid in this regard through a grants based incentive scheme. I think we are all reasonably familiar with the various grants to which one is entitled when one is putting in a new boiler, converting the attic or working on the outside walls. There is no doubt that the scheme has been very successful. There is a difference between the approach to private housing and that to what we call the warmer homes dimension. If the owner of a private house applies for a grant for energy efficiency works and that application is approved, he or she is expected to put up some money also. In the case of the warmer homes scheme, the State bears 100% of the cost of the work. As the Deputy said, that scheme is aimed at homes at risk of fuel poverty.

We are required to make a transition from the grants based system to what has been described as a pay-as-you-save model. A substantial amount of work has been done in this regard by officials in the Department and the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland. They have had regard to similar developments in Britain and made adjustments to the model accordingly. A fairly sophisticated model is ready to go well in advance of the 1 January deadline. The real litmus test will be whether it will be attractive to householders. I sincerely hope it will. Last year there was a decline in applications for the traditional grants scheme. There has been a similar experience in Britain. The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, in particular, has done a great deal of work to analyse why that is the case and uncovered a number of factors. Undoubtedly, the biggest is that consumers and householders are not spending money that they are not required to spend. In some cases, they do not have the money to spend. While that is the main factor, there are others. There is some evidence to suggest people who are aware of the energy efficiency message and convinced of the merits of energy savings were attended to in the first belt. We are looking at what we can do to sell the message better to householders who are not persuaded by the value of these efforts. I hope we will be able to maintain the two schemes in parallel for a little while because of the inevitable time lag, but I am not in a position at this time to say that will happen. It is right that the householder has time to select a contractor, put a contract in place, settle on all the messing that has to be done and so on. Inevitably, there is a time lag between the making of application and execution. We are looking at that issue.