Mr. Michael Walsh:

Mr. Smyth addressed some of the issues so I will just speak to just a couple. In the context of inspection and meeting standards, we are moving towards a similar regime in terms of social housing. For example, a pilot inspection programme was done in County Clare recently. We are taking lessons from that and are in dialogue with the Department to move forward to a specific inspection regime across the country. That will lead to questions regarding the required resources or otherwise but we would certainly see ourselves in that space from next year.

As to the question of why not before 2021, it is partly because of the fact that some are lower than where they are at the moment. In my case, I would see us being at 20% by next year. I think a good number of local authorities will be in that space. The better immediate achievement here would be for everybody to get to 20% by 2020 maybe, so that we are getting very close to it. That is really significant incremental improvement. Taken in context, Dublin city needs another 70 or 80 environmental officers to achieve that. There is an issue with workload. The courts system is failure here in some respects because at the moment we are putting a major emphasis on getting compliance with improvement notices. I do take the point, and Mr. Smyth might reflect on this, that in the extreme cases we do need to have significant sanction. The balance between compliance and enforcement is a continual tension in all enforcement regimes.

There are other things in terms of us moving forward. We need to do it on a relatively planned basis. I am chair of the housing committee and one of the great challenges we have is that the 31 local authorities do not all go off in different directions and that we keep this co-ordinated. There is a role for regionalisation in terms of back office supports in particular, so that we develop the skill sets on the enforcement side of things in terms of going to court and taking the follow-up. We believe there is space for us to do that.

We need to improve our liaison with the RTB. There are simple things such as the unique identifier. We need our reporting to be based on the geographic information system, GIS. Unique identifiers such as Eircode are not available to us in that context. I see a very significant improvement coming by next year in terms of our systems and the reporting that develops from those systems. The targets will ramp up significantly. There was a 50% improvement last year and there will be a 50% improvement this year. Incrementally, it is very good in terms of where we want to get to. We want it to be on a planned basis. The ultimate outcome here is compliance. The ultimate outcome has to be that the landlord wishes to achieve compliance before rather than after the fact. It is happening after the fact at present.

Mr. Smyth has a number of points to make.