Ms Rosemary Steen:

They are linked. One of the critical resourcing and regulatory issues we highlighted, as I mentioned in my response to the earlier question, was the need possibly to look at our tenant registration system and potentially whether we need a new tenant registration system post March because of the proposed changes. As regards some of the changes, such as landlord size, previous rental market history and details of the last notice of termination served, we might not have full details of these matters on our current system, so a question arises for us about upping our capabilities around that. That is something on which I and the chair have been very engaged with our board and the Department.

We also need a new team within the RTB, we believe, to verify and monitor notices of terminations due to the new rule on no-fault evictions and the resetting to market rent. At the moment, we normally manage that through our early intervention team. It comes in as part of the disputes process. While we receive notices of terminations, we do not authenticate each one. We note them as part of the statistical reporting, so that will require more work. I have also mentioned the need for increased resourcing of our compliance and enforcement team. We currently have eight investigators to enforce rental law across the entire country and we need to look at that in terms of the resourcing levels for the new regime. That is just a snapshot of the situation.