Ireland’s one-stop shops show the path to greener British homes

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An unusual group of visitors from the UK flew to the west coast of Ireland earlier this year to see a new attraction – a one-stop shop chain that started a year ago.

The “stores” have little to do with retail: they organize construction work from accredited contractors and distribute government subsidies to homeowners to renovate – or equip existing homes – with heat pumps, solar panels and insulation , reducing their energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Launched days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 sent electricity and natural gas prices skyrocketing in Western Europe, the plan could not have been more timely.

The British party had been invited to Ireland by Matthew Tulley, a British climate campaigner who, as I discovered on the trip, had been arrested for face-pasting Bishopsgate in the City of London in 2021.

The retired businessman got in touch after I wrote an FT column on my campaign to ease UK limits on the modernization of listed homes and conservation areas in North London.

As Britain’s once truly successful carbon policy has come to resemble a Potemkin village of grandiose promise with little substance, British visitors have found much to envy in Ireland.

Twelve One Stop Shops (OSSs) spread across Ireland are fully fledged main contractors or arrange for ‘subbies’ (subcontractors) to carry out the work to standards set and monitored by a regulator called Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI).

They offer three elements that are currently lacking in the UK retrofit landscape: clear standards of what is allowed and how to do it; financial support for those who cannot afford changes on their own; and reassurance of who to hire so that the job gets done right.

Homeowners typically receive up to half the cost as a subsidy, although that percentage has dropped to 40% due to inflation. The poorest families pay nothing.

The programme’s aim is to upgrade 500,000 homes by 2030 — or nearly 30 per cent of Ireland’s housing stock — to a B2 building energy rating, the approximate equivalent of a UK Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). UK rated B. Requiring all new rentals to have a C rating initially proposed for 2025 still has no fixed deadline or legal standing.

Having kicked off what he describes as the ten-year evolution of the Irish system: ‘I was the boy who crawled in the attic [to insulate them]in a 2016 pilot scheme in County Tipperary — Paul Kenny is now an adviser to Eamon Ryan, Ireland’s Green Party energy minister.

“The biggest part of this is an individual saying, ‘I would like to take climate action, but I want to make sure I’m getting what I paid for, that I’m not doing the wrong thing, and that my home won’t be damaged. ‘” says Kenny. “People need to have certainty and it should all be measured by the ease of the customer journey and the phasing out of C02.”

The money comes from a reserved 55% of Irish carbon tax revenues on fuel, including gas, coal, oil, diesel and peat. Now at €48.50 per tonne, this tax is expected to increase annually by €7.50 per tonne under a tripartite coalition deal. The UK froze its fuel tax for 13 years before cutting it last year.

Even when money is available as in Ireland, skills shortages affect both sides of the Irish Sea. Despite an 80% increase in renovations last year, SEAI still had a budget left over, mainly due to a lack of staff to meet demand.

While Ireland’s Energy Minister tells schoolchildren that if they ‘want to be climate activists they should learn how to install heat pumps’, Kenny believes that ‘when people see ahead of them a stable career that won’t go through ups and downs, the more people will let him into those roles, especially with the help of an expanded training”.

Another problem is a lack of public awareness of what is on offer, admits Caroline Ashe Brady, managing director of Kore Retrofit, the first OSS to be registered, based in County Cavan on the border with Northern Ireland , where he also bids for the job.

While some homeowners can’t afford work even on subsidies, others lose subsidies for more than a single carbon mitigation measure because a contractor might not tell them about the availability of a variety of grants available from an OSS. “It’s not malice, but lack of time to stop and tell the client that there is an alternative route that will still generate leads for the contractor,” she says. “Our job is to take the pain out of the industry and convince them that the process will be easy.” However, he says the government seems focused on removing obstacles.

The ongoing tweaking of the Irish system is in stark contrast to the UK’s stop-start approach. The UK’s latest universal retrofit programme, the Green Homes Grant, was withdrawn six months after its launch, but not before the government had spent £50m on US contractors, who had no previous experience in United Kingdom, to manage the grant scheme. Also to blame, says the National Audit Officethey were conflicting goals from the Treasury and the Department of Energy and a complicated registration process for contractor participation.

Andrew Warren, chairman of the British Energy Efficiency Federation, points out that the UK’s checkered history has even included one-stop shops, in the 1990s, when John Major was prime minister.

Given all its experience and expertise, there is no need for the UK to reinvent the wheel. All it has to do – under this government or the next – is start rolling and not stop.

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