Ms Rosalind Carroll:

The next question was around the rent index and the provision of a quick summary of the results. The rent index has not come out but I wanted members with the details. At a high level, what do the results look like? Once again, rents continue to grow. At a national level, rents grew at 7.1%. That would compare to 6.4% in the last quarter. We went from a rent of €1,054, as the average national rent, to €1,060. That is 7% above the peak, which is 7% higher than they have ever been. Within the Dublin market, rent went up 7.8% on an annual basis from 5.1%. This has taken rents in the Dublin area from €1,417 to €1,527. That is 16% higher than they have ever been.

What do the figures tell us? Affordability is still a significant issue within the market. A growing economy, wage inflation and so on are all issues that are still contributing to the market. I would like, however, to highlight that the quarterly figures are showing some moderation within the levels. When we look nationally at what the rent inflation looks like on a quarterly basis, we went from 1.1% inflation in the last quarter to 0.4% inflation for this quarter. Within the Dublin market, we went from 1.1% to 1%. The growth rate on a quarterly basis, for two quarters now, has shown reductions.

The annual rate I just talked about is comparing what we looked like this year, and comparing it to last year. The quarterly rate is what we need to look at in terms of where we might be going. What I really need is a third quarter to enable us to say whether that moderation will continue and see its impact is on the overall annual rate. Obviously, we would like to see moderation in a third quarter. That would have been the best results we would have seen in years within the rental sector.

As said earlier, until we get those exemptions registered with us, there is a little bit of the dark arts with what is going on.

The other thing I would like to point out to the committee is the volatility that is still within that market. Due to the restricted supply, what happens is that the rental sector might get a new development within a particular area and because there is such limited supply, the impact of this on the overall averages is massive. If one looks at the Galway figures over the last number of quarters, they are going up 10% or down 10%. Certain markets are very seasonal. This goes to the underlying issue with the overall market.

This is just to give members a very quick summary. I have concentrated more on Dublin, because it gives them an indication of the rent pressure zones and their impact, and on the national figure. I am not sure how much more detail the committee may want. The committee has these figures and I will be happy to speak on anything else the committee may wish to raise.

On Deputy Casey's question, I have answered the issue of student accommodation, so I will discuss the deposit protection scheme. The deposit protection scheme is already provided for within legislation. The Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, is on record as saying we have concerns about it. We have concerns about it going back to that kind of bureaucracy and about how easy it might be to implement. One of the things within that legislation is that there has to be a cooling-off period before one gives back a deposit. This would result in us giving back deposits at a slower level than the market currently does. This could actually have a worse impact on tenants. The legislation provides that if both parties do not agree to give back the deposit, then the whole issue has to go through our dispute resolution process in a different formal manner. There are changes that could be made to that legislation to make it more effective. We have provided a submission to the Department on that basis. These proposals are probably necessary in order to make the scheme more effective.

The scale of what one is talking about here is huge for the RTB. When I discussed this previously with the Minister, we talked about a two year change management plan. That would come in at the end of it because it would give us the time to plan for resourcing. That resourcing would be beyond just us resourcing and would probably have an outsourcing element to it as well with IT infrastructure, everything else that is needed, communication with landlords and so on. One of the other changes we suggested is that it does not have retrospective impact. If the legislation came in, everybody would come in on the same day and for us to manage that would be hugely difficult. If it was brought in and applied to new tenancies in the first instance, we would be still be dealing with over €100 million a year in transactions. It is a huge scheme. If one compares that to our budget, this year, for instance, we are taking in €14 million. That gives members a sense of the scale of the difference in terms of what one would be transacting. There is a lot to this.