Mr. Robert Deegan:

I was just about to address the experience of the warmth and well-being scheme. That scheme focused on certain community health organisation areas in Dublin. It was for people with particular respiratory conditions. One of the lessons that were learned from it was the importance of inter-agency working between the SEAI, the contractors and the HSE. The HSE is trusted for a lot of houses, with HSE staff visiting people in their homes in some instances. It is a trusted party that homeowners listen to in some instances, whereas they will not listen to the likes of me or the SEAI because they do not even know who we are. They do know the HSE, however, and that the HSE is looking after their best interests. One of the lessons that has been mainstreamed following the warmth and well-being scheme is that when the HSE identifies homes at local level that could use these interventions, it can encourage and support the homeowners to apply for the scheme. It is having additional supports for people who need that help while going through the process of retrofitting their homes and applying to retrofit their homes.

There are cohorts that are really hard to reach. We will have to have strategies for dealing with those cases too. When people apply to the warmer homes scheme, the difficulty in not the consideration of who gets prioritised but the prioritisation approach I mentioned around being eligible, in the first instance, because people receive social welfare payments and, in the second instance, because they live in the worst performing homes.

Another lesson learned from the warmth and well-being scheme, or part of the outcome from that, related to contractors listening to the HSE about how to communicate and what the needs of these hard-to-reach people are, and then the HSE listening to the SEAI and the contractors in terms of what these interventions are and how they can benefit the health and well-being of the people who were in receipt of those measures. It is a very challenging issue but we are going to have to continue to work on ensuring that we have the strategies in place so that these people do not get left behind. From a just transition perspective, we need to ensure that does not happen.