Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I have a couple of brief questions. I want to correct the record as regards the funding. In January 2018, under Project Ireland 2040, significant capital funding was set aside for retrofitting homes, with a target of 45,000 homes per annum. Of course, Covid caused a problem after that. I do not want the impression to be given that there was no funding commitment until recently.

We had the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland before the committee. Supplementary evidence provided by the SEAI indicated that 55% of the cancellations over the last three years were because no works were possible, or they were not technically possible. This is a substantial amount of works that were not carried out. It contradicts Mr. Deegan's statement, which I believe is correct, that there are always works that can be carried out on homes. It may be replacing energy efficient lightbulbs, fitting lagging jackets, sealing up draughts or insulating an attic. There are always works that can be carried out, yet the SEAI is telling us it walked away from 55% of those applications, covering 1,590 homes of some of the poorest people in Ireland. I do not think that is right. There needs to be a mechanism such that in those circumstances, as is stated Department policy, we carry out retrofitting at a standard that is related to fairness and universality and that is consumer-centric. That is not happening for those 1,590 people. It is a policy issue on which direction needs to be given to the SEAI. I fully accept that it may not be able to carry out a lot of the measures under the warmer homes scheme but it is not the case that none of them can be carried out.

On the issue of aggregation, there is a massive time lag. Deputy Aindrias Moynihan spoke about the problem in getting the BER assessment carried out but even getting to that, we are talking about ten months. It takes 14 months on average from the time someone makes the decision to have the works carried out on their home until the building energy assessment is completed. It is impossible to aggregate those cases until they have gone through the system. That is the reason for the current bottleneck, both in terms of processing the application and the energy assessment. Priority must be given to that. It could improve the efficiency in delivering projects. We could cluster an awful lot more together in an area. If you are going into an estate and doing five homes, but there are another seven or eight waiting 14 months for the BER to be completed, it makes no sense that they are not in the system as well. That bottleneck needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.

The Department needs to sit down with the Department of housing to discuss having a co-ordinated strategy of retrofitting the homes of warmer homes scheme applicants and local authority tenants in the same estate. They can be done by the same contractor at the same time, which would save the local authorities a significant amount of money. The work is inefficient as the contractors are doing small-scale operations. That approach would ensure the works were being done in a more timely matter with greater co-ordination across the board.

Those are the key takeaways I would like the Department to look at in the short term to improve the efficiency of these schemes.