Mr. Robert Deegan:

There were a couple of questions. Deputy Collins mentioned the need for fairness to be at the core of everything. We completely agree. That is why it is one of the principles of the retrofit plan. I will put some numbers on this. This year, €300 million or 57% of the total budget allocated for retrofit is for fully funded upgrades across the warmer homes and local authority schemes. In addition, funding has been provided through the national home energy upgrade scheme.

Of the homes completed last year under the national home energy upgrade scheme, that is, the one-stop shop scheme, 60% were AHB homes. A significant number under the community energy grant scheme fell under the energy poverty heading. In addition, enhanced and very generous grants were introduced under the better energy homes scheme for cavity walls and attic insulation. They are the lowest cost but, in many ways, most cost-effective measures that homeowners can take in order to invest in improving the efficiency of their homes.

On the warmer homes scheme alone, to give the Deputy an idea of the expansion of the budgets in recent years, the budget was €40 million in 2019. The budget this year is €208 million. There is concerted action on fully funded upgrades under the warmer homes scheme to ensure the transition is fair.

A point was made about aggregation. I believe Deputy Ó Laoghaire also mentioned mixed tenure housing stock. Steps have been taken in this regard. In the case of a former local authority housing estate in Fingal, much of which has now been bought out by private homeowners, Fingal County Council is working with the SEAI to come up with a model that will encourage as many of those private homeowners as possible to upgrade their homes at the same time as homes are upgraded by the local authority. I cannot overstate the difficulties associated with that. It seems like a simple idea to hoover up all of the houses at the same time. Let us think about the roads we live on. There are people at different points at their lives with different abilities to pay for upgrades and differences about whether it suits them at a particular moment in time to have people traipsing through their houses and retrofitting their properties. Getting private homeowners to have work done at the same time as local authority housing stock is being upgraded is not always the easiest thing to do.

There are initiatives in the warmer homes scheme to improve the efficiency of the scheme through the allocation process to contractors. More bundles are being given to contractors so that they are not going from one side of the country to the other to do individual homes; rather, they are getting batches of homes, and larger batches of homes, which allow them to do work in a more cost-effective way. We are working with the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, the European Commission and the Housing Authority in regard to the initiatives to support apartment or flat complexes to be retrofitted all in one go.

That will consider things like mixed tenure or private housing as well as local authority apartment blocks.

Deputy Collins also mentioned schools and community centres being brought into community projects. Again, I did not mention this scheme earlier, but I should have. I refer to the community energy grant scheme, which is set to do exactly that. This is where a project co-ordinator brings together community centres, schools, the local GAA club and a clatter of houses into one project that is supported by the SEAI to upgrade the properties all in one go. There are solutions available there. The budget for that scheme is €45 million.