Mr. Niall Byrne:

I thank the Senator for the positive comments about the RTB website. We are doing a lot of work to further enhance the website during the early part of next year. This is something that we do. I understand it is important as a channel for the public and for public representatives to access what we do and to get valuable and useful information on the whole area of tenancy law and practice, and how the regulatory system works.

I will start with the timeframes. Yes, the current timeframes need attention from the RTB. The board recognises this as a priority. Streamlining the current disputes timeframes is something we need to give serious attention to. We also need to give serious attention to the resourcing issues, as pointed out by some of the Senator's colleagues earlier. There are questions about this, the members are asking them, and this is highly appropriate. This is accountability and we are happy to be held to account. With the current situation, for various reasons due to the demands coming from legislative change, and the fallout and the hangover from Covid, which had a big impact on the RTB, all of those are legacy issues we are dealing with at the moment. The technology that underpins our disputes function is not the modern technology that underpins our current registration system. Even though the registration system has difficulties, it is built on current technologies, whereas the system that underpins the disputes function is based on what is now very old technology. The RTB is facing some challenges there in how we digitally transform these systems that are from the past so they can perform to a high standard in the present and into the future.

All these matters will be called out in our new strategy. Concrete commitments will be made in there. At the moment we are finalising our business plan for next year and identifying the actions we will take next year that will move us forward over the coming three years to a much better place. I do not stand over the current timeframes as any way ideal. I want to see them carefully analysed to drive out any unnecessary waste of time or loss of productivity, or whatever else it might be that would cause those timeframes to be any longer than they need to be. We are in agreement with the committee on that.

With regard to mediation, we have recently moved to a situation where we actively encourage people who come to us with disputes to default to mediation as opposed to adjudication. We know that mediation is much more effective. The vast majority of mediated agreements stick because the parties have agreed to them themselves and not through the adversarial approach that tends to underpin adjudication, but because our mediators have intervened. This is a form of mediation in the way that mediation exists in lots of areas in society. People are not forced into an adversarial encounter because the parties are engaged with. The mediators work highly effectively to mediate solutions in the vast majority of the cases. Now we say that we are encouraging default mediation. That is where we encourage people to go that way in the first instance. People can still opt for adjudication because that is their right but we try to nudge people towards mediation on the basis that four out of five cases will be successful compared with the adjudication route. It is also quicker, by definition, and it is cheaper. It is also confidential; any agreement is not published whereas the determination orders are all published that come through the adjudication route.

Reference was made to the tribunal. If a case has to go to the tribunal on appeal, it will inevitably add a lot of time. It adds, on average, 26 weeks to process. A tribunal hearing is a complete rehearing of the case. It is not just a review of the papers and of the decision. It is a full rehearing. Essentially, one is starting again at a tribunal. It will, therefore, be quite an extensive and lengthy process. This is all the more reason mediation is the route to encourage people to go to in the first instance. We are very proud of our mediation service in RTB. It is nothing to do with me as it was there long before my time. We were one of the first organisations to introduce telephone mediation. That was successful all along and it was successful during Covid because the service was not impacted by Covid. We have a strong and proud record in that area of our work. Other organisations are quite interested in that as well. This innovation of nudging people towards the much more effective route is a very important thing for us to do and a good use of our resources, which are constrained and in demand in other areas of our work. We look forward to publishing better ongoing information relating to disputes timeframes during the next year, and in our annual report for next year to talk more about the process, why it makes sense and why it is very much in the public interest.