Dr. Tricia Keilthy:

We mentioned in our opening statement a paper from the Vincentian MESL Research Centre which looked at the cost of different BER levels and found that increasing from a low to a high BER almost halves the costs for households. However, even if we bring a household up to an A rating, people will still find themselves in energy poverty because income supports are not where they need to be and costs are still too high. We obviously have to look at energy poverty from the perspective of retrofitting as well as the income support side of things and the actual unit rate cost.

The other important point to note, which we have seen from our own direct experience and which was also shown by ESRI research, is that when social housing tenants upgraded their homes the cost savings were not as much as they would have anticipated because of underheating. It was more a case of people bringing up the comfort level of their homes, so the health implications of energy efficiency could be bigger than the financial impact. I would just make those two points.