Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

What we are increasingly getting is a picture of a fundamental flaw in the Government’s approach to the national retrofitting plan. The Minister will have heard me previously welcome the funding and welcome the commitment, but what we see here is a two-track approach, and we see vulnerable people who are poor and live in cold homes being left behind. It is welcome that we are starting to collect the data in a way that we have not done before. However, for example, when I asked this question in regard to 2022, just 9% of the headline figure of 27,000 retrofits were actually to a B2 standard. The vast majority, under the warmer homes scheme, the free scheme for people who are poorer and in colder homes, are not getting close to the B2 standard - it is only a fraction. At the same time, those people who are starting from a better position in terms of the warmth of their home, but also their access to funding, are getting to that B2 standard.

We have a two-tier approach here. We need to shift the focus to lifting people out of energy poverty and into higher BER standards. We need new metrics.

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