Dr. Ciaran Byrne:

I might take the first question. The UCC study was very important. Dr. McCarthy was the primary author of it and I reached out to her to inquire about it. The Chair is right; it was co-authored with some personnel from MABS. One of the issues is, broadly speaking, that at the point of engaging with MABS, people have a lot of things going on in their lives. Therefore, the ability to go forward to start thinking about retrofitting and the next steps forward is not really there. I took the learnings from that on board and we are looking at our energy poverty schemes. We have the can-pay scheme and the cannot-pay scheme, which is the warmer homes scheme. Within the can-pay, it is quite a broad church. There are people with plenty of money to do it and there are people who do not and who are struggling. We are constantly evolving our model and looking at what we can do it make it easier. In terms of what we are talking about now, with leaning in to our sustainable energy communities, we are having more targeted workshops with the likes of MABS, the Peter McVerry Trust, and things such as that. We then ask, within those frames, how we specifically look at those groups of people rather than leaving it totally as demand-led? In that cohort of people, there are many things going on in their lives and retrofit is not typically top of the pile.

On landlords, we have touched on it and it is a policy area that we will have to address at a societal level. There provision for minimum BERs by 2025. On the question of how to incentivise the landlord, the Chair will appreciate I am being a bit reticent to get into that space, but there is also benefit to the landlord in retrofitting a property he or she owns. We have demonstrated evidence that moving up the BERs increases the value of the home. Therefore, there is a capital gains piece. It may not be the biggest, but in the current housing market it is probably bigger than it was for landlords to do this work. As we are migrating and going back to that kind of key learning from the heat study, which is to grab the ball, run with it and do it now, we will have to lean back in and look at the policy incentives, what we are doing and whether we are doing enough. One of the key principles of what we are about in retrofit is trying to be agile. We are talking here today and I have no doubt that if we come back next year or the year after, we will be saying we are targeting a slightly different sector because we are doing okay in one sector and need to do more in another sector. We will be at that.