Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The timeframe for this is the middle of this year. The target interest rate is 3.5%. It fits into the loan category of the available green loans, and there are green loans from the post office at 4.5%. If people have a mortgage, which many do, they can refinance and probably get it at a lower rate than the 3.5%, perhaps at between 2% and 3%. It is to fit into that category of loan. The idea is that the loan will not be secured on people’s property and it is a non-recourse loan. The idea is that it covers the portion of the retrofit that people cannot afford or that is not covered by the grant, assuming people do not have their own resources to pay for it. Not everybody is going to do a deep retrofit, so it is possible for people to do a much smaller retrofit starting from around €3,000, where the person is only putting up €600 of the capital themselves. The loan could be as low as that and it is over a period of years and is a non-recourse loan. The idea is that people are not frozen out because they have to take on some giant amount of money. They can do it step by step.

It will be mid-2022 before that loan scheme is ready. The idea is also that the loan is to some extent guaranteed by the State, so it is possible to lend to people who have poor credit to insulate their homes so they can save money and will be able to make the payments out of the reduced energy bills they will have in the future.

The Deputy asked about the accounting for shallow retrofits and deep retrofits, and how many of the 500,000 have to get to B2. Last year, 2020 to 2021, some 4,600 B2s were achieved and 8,640 is the target for this year. However, that does not take into account all of the people who have come some steps closer to B2 and who will take another step to move on. There is also the fact that the funding for this is coming from the carbon tax. As the decade moves on, more money will be available for more retrofits and given the scale-up of the available capacity in the labour market to deliver this, the amount of funding available increases each year, so it is going to be a programme that will have more going on in the second half of the decade than the first half.