Ms Rosalind Carroll:

They absolutely should do so and they are protected by the current legislation in so doing. There is protection in the Act against a person maliciously evicting a tenant for taking a dispute. More cases are being brought under section 56 of the Act and more damages are being awarded to tenants. However, the reality is that tenants still feel their home may be at risk. It is to be hoped that the new legislation will stop that but for the moment it can be difficult for some people to make that complaint and I do not wish to understate the scale of that difficulty.

On certificates of rent, I have read some of the committee debates on this issue and am unsure exactly how it is proposed to work. In order that members understand our current registration data work, a landlord is currently required to register every new tenancy or every further part 4 with us. That is why I believe there may be a slight weakness in what is proposed. If a tenant has been in a tenancy for over six years, it must be re-registered or else it is a new tenancy. It is only at that point that I get data. If I were to tomorrow publish all the rental information I have on existing tenancies, it would probably be misleading because it would not be dated. Even if I put a date on it, that might be 2014 or 2015 and the rent may have been reviewed twice since then. There is a difficulty in that regard. I do not currently have the data to identify the current certified rent for a property. We need to bring in annual registration such that I can identify the rents that have been registered every year since that point and identify the date of the last rent review. We do not currently have those data and I could not, therefore, give the committee any intelligence on what is going on in the existing rental market.