Mr. John O'Sullivan:

Much has already been said. The key areas are the challenges in understanding how to apply the guidance from Eurostat and the European Investment Bank that was published a few years ago. Obviously, the issue is the treatment of EPCs in Government accounts. To date, we have not been able to understand how to do that. It really comes down to a circle around this whole area of risk benefit and decision-making. If the balance of risk is shifting in the wrong direction or if that autonomy has not been given over to the energy service company, then it does not meet the rules in terms of on-off balance sheet and that creates a problem.

We have engaged with the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform and this is very much the issue that has come back to us. We are trying to develop more understanding of the issue. We have the energy contracting support scheme, which is a grant scheme we provide for small-scale projects to try to understand the benefit from an energy point of view and also what or how much is involved from a legal point of view and what type of support is needed to actually establish an energy performance contract. It is a scheme that is open, but it has a fairly low level of uptake. It is just showing the level of uptake that is there. There is a general misunderstanding of this area.

The other thing we are doing this year is engaging quite a lot with the local authorities. We see that leisure centres, particularly those with swimming pools, of which there are approximately 100 in the country, are an area in which there is an opportunity to maybe get a bundle together and try to understand how this can be applied in this area. We have also recently engaged with energy suppliers in this area because they, too, have an obligation to achieve energy-saving targets. We are trying to connect all the pieces and get it working in the same direction to understand how it can be done. There is definitely a role for the EPC to achieve the targets and actually bridge this funding gap; we just need to understand how to do it.