Dr. Ciaran Byrne:

There were a number of things coming together. We had Covid. Covid was very significant for us in the context of the warmer homes scheme because while certain amounts of construction could take place, such as openings and closings, empty buildings and office blocks, what we were doing in the warmer homes schemes is going into vulnerable people's houses. For pretty much the entirety of 2021 and the early part of 2022, we were able to do very little on the scheme while applications were coming in. I will give a sense of the applications. The warmer homes programme received 2,931 applications in total in 2021. The comparative figure in 2022 was 9,948. On property upgrades, we did about 2,300 or 2,400. The comparative figure was 4,800. Between 2021 and 2022, we doubled our capacity and more in the context of supply chain issues, labour issues and Covid. It was probably this time last year by the time we finally washed through all the Covid restrictions in 2022. That had implications for us in the warmer homes programme because we go into people's houses and, by and large, they are vulnerable people's houses. We had supply chain issues and a massive increase in applications, which have continued to increase because we are in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis and an energy crisis. We have a procured framework for the programme so there are 33 contractors on a procured framework. We have a certain number of contractors and many would have taken on more subcontractors. We worked very hard with that contract to increase the output. We also provided inflationary increases on two occasions. We made some significant changes in how we cash-load and pay them to increase their output. We also increased massively the allocation of homes to contractors to allow them to build in-----