Dr. Tricia Keilthy:

I might take the Deputy's question on the PUP and some of the difficulties people are facing in our experience and then hand over to Ms Petrie to answer the question about just transition. We cannot underestimate the important role the PUP has played in keeping households afloat, particularly in the initial stages of lockdown. In our experience, we are finding families whose savings are gone and are now faced with long-term unemployment. Our concern is that if the payment is unwound too quickly, people will be left in a very difficult situation. This also raises the point we made earlier about ensuring that existing social welfare payments are adequate enough to meet the cost of a minimum need for households across the board. We are quite concerned about levels of personal debt and problem debt arising from the pandemic. We have had a lot of calls from people who are struggling with their utility bills and rent arrears. There are protections for people who have been impacted by Covid in respect of rent arrears but there is no financial mechanism to help people to bridge the gap between what they are owed and what the landlord requires in terms of the property. We would like to see the Departments of Social Protection and Housing, Local Government and Heritage work together to identify families and households with significant rent arrears and put additional supports in place because we do not want the public health crisis to be followed by a deeper housing crisis when we are already battling a housing crisis. The issue of utility arrears came through quite strongly in the Red C research we commissioned but it is also coming up in data from the Commission for Regulation of Utilities. The commission is seeing an increase in customers in arrears in respect of gas bills. We need to see suppliers and the Government working together to address levels of debt. This highlights the need to ensure that the fuel allowance is adequate and available to all households experiencing energy poverty. At the moment, it is quite means-tested and families in receipt of the working family payment and the newly unemployed cannot access it but it is a very important form of support for households.