Ms Rosalind Carroll:

To answer Deputy Ó Broin's question, in terms of the timeline I have pretty much covered it already. I will go back to the idea of simplicity. We need to think about how difficult we make it in legislation to implement or for people to understand. In terms of the notices of termination that come before us, in 2015 69% of those were found to be invalid. They were found to be invalid for technical reasons. We have managed to reduce that down to just around 40% through our education programme. Now we are seeing there is more regulation on the rent review side. About 77% of the rent reviews coming before us are found to be invalid. I meet landlords and tenants on a daily basis who do not understand what they are meant to be doing. Tenants do not understand what they can come to us for and the landlords do not understand what they should be doing. If we tried to keep things more simple it would be much easier for people to do that and also easier for us to implement in terms of supporting the sector. I talk a lot about enabling regulation. The regulation should not be about red tape, it should be about our objective. The objective is to create a well-functioning rental sector that supports tenants and landlords when things are going wrong. They are the things I would like to see as it goes through.

I have talked about the resource allocation and our discussions with the Minister.

Student licences was the next issue that was brought up. We believe that a lot of the student accommodation that is purpose built but within the private sector comes within our remit. I want to be explicit about that because some of the press think it is not. It is really important that tenants understand that they should take cases to us. There are a lot of cases where people might claim that something is a licence. It does not matter what it is called; it is about what its substance is.

If a tenant has peaceful and exclusive occupation of that dwelling, and is not being moved from room to room on a weekly or regular basis, these are two core principles that one would look at in terms of looking at student accommodation. That is the first thing.

That does not mean that providing clarity in the legislation would not provide everybody with a bit more assurance on that. I just wanted to say that because in the interim, before whatever legislative change might be necessary, it is important that if people are concerned and feel that a landlord may not be complying with the legislation, they should, in the first instance, talk to us to see if we can look at the case to see if it is a licence or a tenancy. If it is a tenancy, it comes within our remit.