Dr. Ciaran Byrne:

I thank the Deputy. I will take those two questions. To clarify, on the warmer homes scheme, we have 33 contractors. It is a procured panel. The one with the 1,300 contracts is the better energy home scheme for individual measures and that is growing. A constraint to be aware of on warmer homes scheme is that it is a procured panel. There are 33 contractors on it and we have to work through those 33 contractors. On that scheme, the Deputy correctly identified that there is a significant period in terms of getting them done. We have discussed and developed proposals which we have now with our parent Department regarding how we expedite that and bring that waiting period down. That is one part of it, albeit a slightly larger one.

Within the scheme itself, there are also so-called "pain" points.

This is a phrase we use on the customer journey where we look at every single part of the journey, we ask how we can make that better, what are we doing here and what is adding value. It is that point of designing a constant iteration of improvement. Can we make marginal changes across multiple parts of the process to improve the cycle time? We are doing as much of that as we can. We are also trying to make it beneficial for contractors. For example, we have given them a 4% increase in the rates across all measures earlier in the year and we have just implemented a 75% stage payment, which improves the cash flow for contractors on that scheme.

On the second question which was specifically around retrofitting and eligibility, people are not eligible for a scheme where they cannot be funded twice for the same measure, if that makes sense.