Ms Emer Morrissey:

I will deal with the question of what happens if an individual tenant contacts us. At the moment, we have a certain amount of data sharing with other bodies so we are able to search for a landlord address, and we can also look at our own data to see if the person had previously been party to a dispute or an enforcement order. There is a certain amount we can look at. The investigations team have powers under the Act and can look further and request information from agents, tenants or the landlords themselves. Obviously, there are some cases where there is a difficulty in finding people but we have powers to do that, including personal service in individual cases.

As Ms Steen said, we have some data sharing. Since January, my team have been reviewing our current referrals process and looking at our data sharing agreements and where we can expand on that. We have been working with HAP shared services and Revenue around that, and Ms Steen will speak about that data sharing agreement. We are currently working with Revenue on a joint project to try to specifically address non-registration. While there are some limitations in the data sharing, those changes will help us.