Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The big outlier is the TBESS scheme. I would be interested to hear what other members of the committee have to say on this. There was an announcement in the budget last year that up to €1.3 billion could be assigned to the scheme. More than €650 million of this was assigned for last year and €650 million for this year. The scheme was only launched in late November. Clearly, for whatever reason, and I am happy to go into the reasons, there was nothing like the take-up that we expected at the end of last year. It was only a fraction of the allocated estimate. This year so far the scheme has paid out €26 million of more than €600 million allocation. There are approximately €31 million worth of approvals in total, including the €26 million paid out.

Just under 23,000 companies have registered for this. We thought the figure would be ten times that. We have engaged a lot with the sector. I have done so, as has the Department of Finance. We have also worked with the Minister, Deputy Catherine Martin, on her sector because we expected an awful lot of the hospitality sector would be affected, including hotels, restaurants, pubs and guesthouses. There is consultation happening between the Departments that is being led by the Department of Finance. We have already agreed to extend beyond the end of January the timeline for applying for support for last September. When this was launched initially businesses could apply up to four months after the month concerned. The qualification criteria, as Deputy O'Reilly knows, was that the cost of the energy bill needed to be 50% higher than last year and people could claim back 40% of the difference in terms of the extra cost. If we were to change the thresholds we would have to change primary legislation, which would take some time.

There are things we may be able to do without primary legislation in the short term to extend deadlines and potentially apply some other flexibility. This is in discussion at present. The first thing we have to do is understand from businesses and representative bodies why the uptake has been as low as it has been. It is likely the following could have contributed to the current low take-up. According to a recent IBEC survey, many businesses are still in contracts with energy suppliers and will not be impacted until the first quarter of this year. As such, they may not have qualified yet for the thresholds. Approximately one quarter of the registered businesses have been approved. Upon being approved the business needs to regularise its tax matters.

This may cause a lag in payments. In other words-----