Ms ?ine Stapleton:

In relation to AHB-funded schemes, a significant portion are funded through what we call our capital advance leasing facility, CALF, scheme. Due to the particular challenges around cost of construction increases and interest rate increases, that became a challenging model for the AHB sector last year in a number of respects. In some rural local authority areas, the link we had made to market rent was not sufficient to cover the full cost of the unit and in some urban areas, the challenge was simply the excess cost of construction. We put a CALF review in place to give greater flexibility on that model. We have a robust value-for-money procedure with the AHB applications that come in for those CALF applications. They go through analysis by the housing agency. It examines the financial analysis and also does a multi-criteria analysis on the proposals.