Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I do not disagree with what the Senator has said. We will continue to revise and review, as I said. I have two points to make. The reason we are seeing the numbers of completed works grow dramatically is that the cost of fuel remains very high by historical comparisons. The advantage of investing in the home is that it brings down fuel bills and improves the value of the house. Houses with a low BER sell for a higher value. In the interim, while living in the house, the experience is incredibly different. It is much more comfortable and there are huge health benefits and so on.

I forgot to mention one other area. There are so many different areas we are working on but one of them is social housing. That is really important. As I said, the first key target is to spend the majority of the money the State has on those on lowest incomes. One further development I expect to see is that if we go into an estate, where there may be a mix of social housing and private housing, we start to do both at the same time. The one-stop shops were always going to take time to scale up but where the savings must, will and should come is when work can be aggregated and ten houses can be done rather than one. We expect to see prices coming down there. If, in the interim, as the Senator says, the price is very high, the householder has the option of doing it on an item-by-item basis. We are not restricting that. However, the one-stop shop is designed to get aggregation to bring the cost down. I will continue to review, exactly as Senator Chambers said, the number of applications converting into construction. Mechanisms that show flexibility and help the one-stop shops and householders to aggregate are the key next step.