Mr. Paul Kenny:

On social housing, I am sure the officials from the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government will allude to this question later. There is a two-step approach of fabric first and then heating. I think that is broadly the right thing to do. The problem is that for a lot of local authorities, particularly those in rural areas, the primary appliance is solid fuel with a very inefficient stove that can burn cheap fuel at €5 a go or whatever. If we multiply the efficiency by 60% it still results in a very poor BER rating. If we get the fabric right, the next phase will be to put in a very efficient heating system. It is broadly very sensible to get the whole stock up from a fabric and ventilation point of view and then to address the heating aspect. My local authority is moving into phase 2 and the schemes are now available for heating for that phase. I broadly think the scope, scale, type and approach that the Department has taken is right. We are all frustrated with the lack of pace but that is an Exchequer question. It is beyond my pay grade, for want of a better phrase.

On the one-stop-shop model, the agency was one of 16 set up and originally co-funded from Europe in the late 1990s. Three now provide those services. The idea was to provide services to both the local authority and the community at large, including SMEs, community buildings and housing. There are really only two of us left providing the suite of services. In our business model, the main cost is staff. About 78% of our running cost is the engineers and other staff. A certain portion of our business is commercial, so we have commercial clients that pay commercial rates. We charge them at a profit and use that profit to do public good work, including policy discussions such as today's and my own salary. We then have programmes like the SEAI-funded better energy communities initiative or the deep retrofit grant. We use a combination of funding from the SEAI, the homeowner and the energy efficiency obligation scheme to fund that work. We have some support from the EIB for three years to try to scale up that renovation. We have more or less tripled the amount of carbon savings and energy savings over the last three years with that support. It works out roughly at between 25% and 30% of the cost of providing the service. Hopefully by the time the EIB support is gone, we will be more efficient and better able to do that. Our board comprises representatives from the local authority and experts and it is governed to achieve a service. It is a non-profit service delivery overall. We charge a profit on commercial and operate on a non-profit basis for communities, charities and homes.