Dr. Ciaran Byrne:

On whether the situation is fair or unfair, I am not sure and I just think that it is interesting. I can understand the dilemma where a contractor looks at these one-stop shops being treated like a favourite son, as it were. We have 12 places in the pipeline and ten more to go. We have relatively strict qualifying criteria because we want people to operate at scale. It is very difficult to retrofit a retrofit so we want to make sure we have a quality system base. A key driver in a one-stop shop is having those quality processes in place. Many of them, though not all of them, have got ISO 9000 certification and things like that so there is that piece in the market.

I reiterate that we are on a journey. Many individual contractors are working with one-stop shops presently. For example, some of the one-stop shops come from the construction sector where they are doing it themselves and some come from the project management side of things where they are contracting in very many individual contractors. I can understand people looking to get into it. If you are a medium-sized contractor, there are constraints in place. We have the community energy grants scheme where we encourage people to get involved in multiple projects, build up those skills, learn the lessons and then apply to become a one-stop shop. Nobody is excluded per se. It is about growing into it.