Mr. Robert Watt:

That is probably the culture of the organisations going back a long time. If one thinks about the retrofitting challenge for a moment, one needs a combination of policies. On average it costs about €1,000 per year to heat a home with gas. With larger homes, the cost is obviously greater. In terms of retrofitting, heat pumps cost €8,000 to €9,000. Significant retrofitting can cost €10,000, €15,000 or €20,000, which can be significant. There is a variety of different elements. One has to have the incentive. If it is more expensive, ultimately, people will look over time about making savings. If there is an incentive, they will not have to endure the hassle. Can they access the finance? There might be an issue then for low-cost loans. Who is subsidising the loans? Ultimately, we are talking about the State doing this, which is a cost to the generality of taxpayers.

There are distributional issues as well. If one is talking about providing subsidies for better off households to insulate larger homes, that has a negative redistribution effect since the rest of are paying for higher income groups. There has been a lot of work done in the UK on why people do not retrofit. When it comes to attics, for example, this work suggests that the major challenge is people could not be bothered cleaning out their attics. They decided to give grants to declutter attics. This is what the nudge unit came up with. Rather than giving very elaborate grants to retrofit, they gave a grant for someone to declutter one's attic, which was much more effective. There are a variety of different instruments here, including nudges, regulations, taxes and financing instruments. The State, as the Deputy said, through general taxation or Exchequer funding cannot do this job. It is just not possible. It is too expensive and it would also be wrong from a distributional aspect to try to do so.

On a communications strategy, if any society is going to engage in this type of enormous change, it requires a wider political consensus, which has other implications which are not my business. I do not think it makes sense to think about a particular part of a State talking about a communications strategy because the changes that are required are so enormous that there has to be consensus among political groupings and other civic society groupings, like trades unions, about how we do this. This change can take place incrementally without that wider support.

On winners and losers, we do not know all of the policy instruments. If we had a greater sense of the policy changes, then we could look through and have a better sense of the winners and losers. In the absence of that-----