Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have a figure for 2019. From memory, I believe it was greater than 4,000 in respect of local authority houses. I do not have the figures for the scheme overall as it is operated by a different Department. From the point of view of social housing, I believe it was greater than 4,000 but I stand to be corrected. I will get the exact figure for the Deputy; I have it somewhere in my notes.

The court's biggest criticism of the scheme is that no BER was calculated before work started. It seems obvious that this should have been done. That was rightly changed more than a year ago. For the past 12 months, we have been able to monitor whether the retrofits under the scheme have been successful. The purpose of the scheme was to make people's homes more comfortable and more affordable to run from an energy point of view, as well as achieving a higher BER for homes and making them healthier places to live. There is more than one way to assess its success. It was also based on low-cost interventions. Phase 2 will involve a much greater spend.

The average cost of the early stage of that scheme from 2013 to 2017 or 2018 was approximately €3,200 per house so it was not going to have a massive impact on anybody's house. It involved small, low-cost improvements. The second phase is a greater investment of over €22,000 or €23,000 in most cases, which should have a much greater impact. There is a guaranteed BER rating taken at the start and at the end to show the progress. In some work there is a difficulty with that, often involving a delay, but we are clear in the voids programme over the last couple of years that a BER rating must be included for before and after to be able to monitor the work, the progress and so forth. We have made the changes that the audit is seeking. They are in place already. However, as I said, improvements can always be made.

The Deputy referred to the EU fiscal rules. There are EU fiscal rules that constrained what the country could spend overall and also our ability to borrow. In fairness, I tried to make a point earlier but I was short of time. When we took office in 2011 we were unable to borrow. Nobody would give us any money. We must remember that. The figures then showed we were over €20 billion overdrawn each year so there had to be major structural reform of our public finances, which was achieved. The benefits of that can be seen now. We are now in a position to borrow a large amount of money to invest in the recovery due to Covid-19 this year, next year and the year after that. The Deputy is saying that we should have had money in the years from 2011 to 2014, but nobody had money and nobody would give us any money. When we could get our hands on it, fiscal rules or not, we spent the money on housing in a sustainable way. Now we must build on that and add more to it.

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