Mr. Seamus Hoyne:

I will take the HLI question first. HLI is a measure of heat lost through the building fabric. The original benchmark was set at 2.3 units, or watts per degree Kelvin per metre squared. Essentially, it is a method of measuring the heat lost through the building. It was decided, based on initial modelling, that for a heat pump to work the heat loss indicator should be below 2.3. There are sound physics bases for that. Through the retrofit projects that have been done to date, and the assessments that have been done of buildings, it became clear that for some buildings - and generally this is on a case-by-case basis depending on the building typology and particular physical aspects of building - to get to the heat loss indicator of 2.3 in an existing retrofit could require investment, for example in taking up pavements outside to reduce the heat loss. We could add significant investment onto the retrofit and maybe only achieve a 1% or 2% energy efficiency reduction, or emissions reduction, in that building.

The level of investment required to achieve that is potentially outside the scope of the building owner or homeowner and so, in many cases, those retrofits are not progressing. The proposed study is to look at the efficiency of retrofitting with a heat pump where the heat loss indicator, HLI, is between 2.3 and 2.6. Initial evidence indicates that, with such a HLI, a heat pump will still work very efficiently and achieve a suitable coefficient of performance, COP, and there will be very minimal impacts on the overall running costs and emissions of the building in question. The HLI issue has been being raised for a number of years. The industry is very keen for research to be done urgently to address this issue so that we can potentially amend the guidelines and regulations in respect of the national retrofit plan and funding grant schemes to allow retrofits to progress on buildings whose HLIs fall within the 2.3 and 2.6 band. That is the critical piece of work that needs to be done. The great thing is that we now have a significant number of retrofits done. All of those retrofitted buildings will have a building energy rating, which involves a calculation of the HLI. We can now look at the performance of those buildings and look at the impact of heat pump running costs within the 2.3 to 2.6 band. The numbers need to be crunched to inform the policy decision. That is what is urgent now.

As to the Deputy's second question, which was on innovations to attract new people into construction and particularly the area of sustainable built environment, we need to change the messaging with regard to attracting people into the construction sector, particularly in respect of the sustainable built environment area. We are moving into a space in which a great amount of digital tools are being used. There is an image of the construction or built environment sector as being highly labour intensive. We are now looking at modular systems and a lot of design work being done in offices by very skilled designers, researchers, engineers and architects. On site, we are moving towards much cleaner systems. That is the first aspect we need to get across with regard to the construction and sustainable built environment sectors. That image and messaging needs to be very clear if we are to attract people in.

The other critical issue is that there is simply a lack of workers in the country. We need to again consider looking across Europe to attract people to come to the country and to encourage people who gained really valuable skills after moving abroad in recent years to return to Ireland. A concerted effort is needed. With regard to plumbers and electricians, a very significant amount of work is going on in terms of attracting people into apprenticeships and scaling up the number of apprenticeships but we need to scale those efforts up even further to achieve the numbers we need to achieve.