Ms Rosalind Carroll:

I wish to clarify the role of RTB in respect of the process. Once the Housing Agency makes a referral, it goes to the Minister. The Minster then must refer it to the RTB for us to look at it. We either confirm that it meets the criteria or that it does not. There is no discretion on the formula. The issue of the formula, where the increase must be over 7% in four quarters, is defined in legislation. There is no discretion in terms of whether something does or does not meet the formula. It also has to relate back to our last published rent index, which in this case was the third quarter of 2016, and it is this which we would have been referring to. In spite of the fact that Drogheda was not referred to the RTB, I can tell the Deputy that it would not have met the criteria. The average rent in terms of our rent index was €909. It would have had to have been more than €973 to meet the criteria. It was a bit out.

Deputy O'Dowd asked about methodology. We have now published that on our website and all the reports are on the website. We are trying to be as transparent as we can with the data.

It is not a simple average, so it will take account of the types of properties in the area and it also looks at new rents only. Deputy Coppinger mentioned earlier that our existing rents data is not often updated because landlords do not telephone us and tell us every time they review a rent. Therefore, the data that we use to inform our analysis are the new registrations in that particular quarter. We had across the country just over than 30,000 new registrations for the third quarter and that is what we would have based our analysis on. Our next rent index is due to come out on the week of 20 March. We are pushing to be more transparent with our data. Up until this point, we only ever had data for Dublin and outside of Dublin. We will be trying to publish more of the local electoral areas, LEA, data, as time goes on.

All of this has happened at quite a pace and how much of that I get to will depend. We are trying to ensure we get to those data relatively quickly. We will have some elements of LEA data available within the next rent index report, which will be published in the week beginning 20 March and which will relate to the fourth quarter of 2016.