Dr. Ciaran Byrne:

I thank the Deputy for stating his concerns so clearly. There is no question but that these are ambitious targets. We have a target of 20 companies for this year. The funding we have between now and 2030 is €8 billion, fully half of which is for the energy-poor sector, so the B2 ratings will come from across all the SEAI programmes, not just the one-stop shops.

We are considerably ramping up our warmer homes scheme, which is the energy-poor scheme. We expect to deliver a lot of B2s from that. We also have the solar photovoltaic, PV, scheme, which we get a lot of B2s out of, and the better energy homes scheme. We are going to be strategically looking at our community scheme, from which we get B2s as well. The B2 target is not from the one-stop shops alone. It is from all the schemes across the SEAI.

We are in the process of growing the market and the Deputy articulated a very good concern. There are 20 companies right now. Experience, both in our previous history growing and developing schemes and generally, has taught us that we should grow the market in a balanced way. A clear policy direction is baked into statute. We also have significant finance. Those are two of the biggest concerns of the industry. We have been going back out to the industry and contractors and telling them they now have an ability to scale up their businesses. They now have assurance that we will be here for the long term, they have a good sense of the policy direction and they also have significant finance backing it up through demand from homeowners.

The other point about retrofitting, which will be significant in growing that market, is that retrofits will be required wherever there are homes in the country, in every constituency. We are seeing a lot of positivity from contractors who feel they have a rewarding and satisfying career and business opportunity in their local area, rather than heading to the larger urban centres where a lot of construction activity takes place. We believe it is very much a stretch target but it is achievable. We will continue to grow the one-stop shops but we have a relatively high bar because of the conditions I outlined earlier around quality, capability and scale. There is no upper limit to the number of one-stop shops. We will continue to grow that number.

On the lower-income families to which the Deputy alluded, exactly half of our €8 billion budget is going towards the warmer homes scheme, which we are in the process of scaling up. We have had significant interaction with the local authorities and on foot of the new scheme we have also been back in to our colleagues in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and local authorities. The committee will appreciate that I am not in a position to speak on their behalf about delivering their targets but it would be fair to say we have a shared vision. We already have a pilot programme in the midlands where we are working with local authorities. They can go into particular estates or areas and retrofit all the homes rather than just one group or the other. We are in the process of building another pilot programme with them to build this capability.

From a contractor's point of view, and they are the ones delivering this, they consistently say to us that aggregation is what is important for them to be able to do their business efficiently. In a housing estate, which might have formerly been a local authority housing estate entirely under the purview of the local authority and the Department, there are typically mixed homes now. Even in some private sector estates there are mixed homes because of the various parts of the rental sector and housing assistance programmes. This is about achieving the target. Those 500,000 B2s are the roadmap to the target. The target is ultimately CO2 emission reduction. We want to build a system where contractors can go into a housing estate and it does not really matter what type of home someone is in. It is about reducing the emissions. If it is a can-pay home, a home that can pay part of it right now, a fuel-poor home or anything in between, we will be able to get the contractors to aggregate. That is the basis of the pilot scheme that is currently running and will end this summer. We will take learnings from that and those will be used to build onto the next scheme with the local authorities.

I share the Deputy's views about the loan scheme. We are working hard with the Department. We have done a lot of work on our behavioural analysis and affordability is coming up as a significant factor. A lot of people are interested. The surveys we did late last year showed that approximately a third of people had not really thought about it, a third were interested but had not acted and a third were interested and had acted. I would be strongly of the view that that has changed radically in the last six or eight weeks, and certainly since the start of the year. The low-interest loan will be very significant for people getting on that journey, and that is coming.