Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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It is encouraging to see the substantial build up in retrofits under the warmer homes scheme, which may have been a bit suppressed in 2020 and 2021, compared to 2019 when there were more than 6,000 homes in the scheme.

I presume the 6,000 new homes will be a much deeper retrofit . Does he attempt to distil from these programmes what the climate impact of them is? Presumably a lot of shallower retrofits are going on in the general scheme, which comprises 24,000 homes. Some of them probably give faster bang for the buck. Would we get a better picture of how we are progressing if some sort of relationship between the work being undertaken and the climate impact was tracked and reported? That might be of interest. There are 162,000 homes with cavity walls that are not insulated. That is low hanging fruit and cheap to do. One would wonder why we are not able to reach them. There is this sort of balance between setting the BER B2 as being where we want to get to by 2030 and beyond versus picking up the low hanging fruit at the moment. I am interested to know how we might mop up whatever is there.

We are missing a beat on the low take-up of the smart meters. They are a tool in the hands of the public but most people probably do not know what their potential is. Active sign-up is required because of GDPR rules. Has the Department looked at the possibility of sitting down with the Data Protection Commissionerto see is there any way of overcoming the data protection requirements? There could be a much higher take-up of something that can save money for people at this time, switching to cheaper usage times. I just find it hard to understand how we roll out a programme to 2.5 million homes at quite considerable expense and then GDPR rules mean that the meters are predominately not being availed of.

I would like the latest update on the loan scheme. I know it has had some teething problems. Are we close to being in a position to knowing how the loan scheme will work?

Is the Minister of State beginning to see the trends on the breakout between the one-stop shop where people sign up for the big job versus the people who decide to do work in a piecemeal fashion with the warmer homes scheme being a third strand? Are there any early indicators of the number of people willing to go the one-stop shop route and a deep retrofit?