Mr. Bob Jordan:

On tenants who are not paying rent, the first commandment in the private rented sector is, “Thou shall pay thy rent.” That is the basis of the landlord-tenant relationship and there are plenty of rules around it. It is a question of whether someone cannot or will not pay. Where someone cannot pay, we are trying to identify supports.

The Private Residential Tenancies Board is the regulatory body for the private rented sector. A landlord can bring a dispute with a tenant to it. One of the issues in the private rented sector is that disputes continue to take a considerable time to be heard. Obviously, from a landlord's perspective, the sooner they are heard, the better.

It has been talked about how well public private partnerships have worked in the school accommodation sector. I am not well versed enough to comment, other than to say we need purpose-built student accommodation. It could be modular or drop-down units and provided in campuses quickly. I would be in favour of this because it would free up supply immediately in the private rented sector.

One of the things about the rent supplement scheme is that it is not always about the limits, although they are extremely important. The administration of the rent supplement scheme hinders tenants in a lot of ways too. For instance, a landlord could have two prospective tenants, one of whom who depends on rent supplement, while the other does not. The tenant who is not dependent on rent supplement will have a deposit and the first month’s rent to hand. The rent supplement tenant, on the other hand, will have a form and the landlord might not see rent or any money from him or her for six to nine weeks. He or she might not see it at all if the tenant is not approved for payment of rent supplement. The administration of the rent supplement scheme, therefore, needs to be dealt with. Tenants need to be preapproved under the scheme, the administration of which needs to be speeded up. Tenants need to be given deposits and all the support they need in order to be able to compete in the market.

Clearly, having broad geographical regions with a single rent supplement limit does not make sense.

In view of the data on the rented market that was not available when the rent supplement scheme was introduced but that we have now, we need localised limits for the areas under pressure, such as Dublin 15, 24, 1 and 2. Community welfare service staff should be given a bandwidth in which to operate, however it should be less visible to landlords. The exact amount of money that landlords can aim for should not be put on a notice board or on the Department of Social Protection or Citizens Information Board websites. It does not make much sense. This is our experience. The Government should increase rent supplement for a local sub-markets.

A number of years ago, a directive was introduced that rent supplement could be increased for people at risk of homelessness. The same circular specified, in bold writing, that if a person makes this decision he or she must report to the Minister. This created a chill factor on discretion in the community welfare service. To some extent, Threshold's tenancy protection service is the outsourcing of discretion. Increasingly, the community welfare service is using more discretion. However, it must be mainstreamed back into the mainstream rent supplement scheme.

Often, the Department of Social Protection ends payments for tenants when the landlord changes. Regulations must be put in place to ensure the payment continues, even when a receiver is in place. This has been a problem in the private rented sector for a long time. One way for a landlord to get tenants out of a property was to telephone the community welfare service, say something about the tenant and stop the payment. We are working on delivering temporary rent supplement increases for people, and it works. It should be available to everybody, as far as possible, across the board.

Landlords are not familiar with the HAP scheme, although there are many benefits to it in some respects. People at risk of homelessness should not have to fall into homeless services in order to qualify for the HAP. We hope to deliver a service at least with Dublin City Council whereby we can move people who are genuinely at risk of homelessness directly onto the HAP scheme without having to access homeless services. There could be benefits to it.

Landlords will come before the committee this afternoon and talk about bedsits. Much has been said in the public domain about the new bedsit regulations bringing properties out of the market and landlords being forced to put tenants by the side of the road. None of it is true. The bedsit regulations have been very successful. Environmental health officers do not have the power to shut down any property, even if it is substandard. According to figures from Dublin City Council, approximately 90% to 95% of landlords have complied. For example, they previously had properties that had shared toilets on a landing, but now, each individual unit has a toilet. This is what the bedsit regulations were all about. This means there is better accommodation available. However, in the course of its inspections of bedsits, Dublin City Council has discovered approximately 50% of properties did not comply with fire safety regulations. This has been the major issue.

The bedsit measures have had a bootstrapping effect on the private rented sector. They have made bad accommodation into better accommodation. The question is where all the bad accommodation has gone. Based on registrations in the PRTB, more than 1,000 bedsits from last year have been registered, which means tenants are living in them. I do not know where properties have disappeared from the market. It appears the bedsit regulations have increased supply. This has happened because many of the older private rented properties were in such poor condition that they were approximately 60% occupied. Given that landlords were, to some extent, compelled to bring them up to scratch, more properties have become available. Counterintuitively, the bedsit regulations may have increased supply. We cheered this on from the outset and we believe it has been very successful. The figures are publicly available from Dublin City Council. Any roll-back on the bedsit regulations would reward the very small number of landlords who have not complied with the regulations but who are still allowed to rent out their properties.