Ms Rosalind Carroll:

I will briefly respond to the point made by Senator Boyhan on partnership. That is the key. We have a fragmented regulatory structure because we have the local authorities on one side and us on the other and I think there is a lot of room for us to improve that. We will work in partnership over the next year to try to address that. It should not matter whether a member of the public refers an issue to us or to a local authority. We can put systems in place to deal with that.

Reference was made to the stock coming back in and also to data intelligence. Mr. Walsh talked about risk-based frameworks. At the moment, when one sees a list of contraventions, that is all it is; it does not identify what is serious versus what might be a minor infringement. In terms of targeting the bad stock we must get to a point where we have a red rating to identify the work that needs to be done. We must put in a framework to address the seriousness of the various issues.

At the moment we are developing a landlord accreditation scheme. The idea behind it is to look at landlords in their overall responsibility. We want them to be able to say they have done a course which says they know not just about the standards but about everything they should be doing and that they would do an exam at the end of it. We think there is potential for the NCT to be pulled in as part of that. There is a lot of potential in that model which we are piloting at the moment. We should be able to report to the Oireachtas on that in the future.