Ms Rosalind Carroll:

I want to go back to some of the questions that had been asked and I want to finish my response on Deputy O'Dowd's earlier query regarding the incentives to have the real rent registered with the Residential Tenancies Board. The Deputy made a reference to daft.ie, but it is probably the same issue for us also. There is some protection within the law so if a dispute is referred to us we would use the rent as it is on the tenancy agreement. A landlord cannot suddenly claim that the rent they put in at €700 was actually €900. Landlords put themselves at risk during any potential disputes. If rent arrears were owed to them, for example, the rent arrears would only be calculated on the basis of the tenancy agreement rent.

The legislation also allows us to award damages of up to €20,000 when a case comes before us that is found to be not in accordance with the law. I accept that it is not always incentivised for landlords to register the rent, but there are a number of protections within the law. Reference was made to education and awareness and these protections are part of the information we try to tell people about. We are spending more time ensuring that tenants are aware of their rights, and that landlords are also aware of those rights. We are aware that some landlords inadvertently apply the wrong rents. We are trying to reach one fifth of the population to tell them about all the new regulations that have come in. One of the elements we have put up onto the website is a rent calculator. As members are aware, the formula to calculate rent can be quite complicated to operate so the website allows a person to look up to see if they are in a local electoral area that is a rent pressure zone. Many people do not know what side of the line they are on, and so on. Landlords or tenants can find this out straight away on the website. They can also check what a 4% increase calculates up to on a pro ratabasis since the last rent review period. That facility is there for any landlord or tenant to check if the increase is being applied correctly. They can print this off and attach it to the rent review. The rent review notice is now prescribed by law and a landlord must explain to a tenant how the rent has been calculated. We have created this tool so they can print the calculation and the tenant can see it has come from our website. All of this should help with people's knowledge and also help with tenants needing to know if the calculation is correct because they can check it on our website.

Deputy Coppinger asked some questions earlier and it will be useful to back through them. She asked about policing and compliance. The Residential Tenancies Board does not have a policing role. Our remit has not changed under the legislation. We do not have powers of investigation. Our powers are quasi-judicial in that we are there to replace the courts. When a case comes through us, it must be done through a dispute process. The issue of the €20,000 award or the risk of arrears is the real policing part of that. It is worth pointing out that I have just checked our statistics prior to this meeting, and since 24 December we have had a 135% increase in cases referred to us on rent related matters. This shows that people are using the disputes process. Many have not come all the way through our system yet. Of the cases that have come through, generally they were rent reviews that imposed on people before they should have been. There is a 24-month period during which a landlord cannot serve more than one rent review. In these cases, the landlord has tried to increase rents - perhaps because of the new rent regulations coming in. Of the cases we have heard so far, we have found that the majority of the rent review notices have been invalid and the findings have been in favour of the tenants in those cases. We are actively dealing with those issues as they come through. Our timeline for dealing with those issues in mediation at the moment is five weeks. We are getting through cases for adjudication in 12 weeks. Our adjudication process involves an evidence-based system whereas our mediation is all about coming to agreement and so on. Clearly, for this issue it may be an evidenced based system.

On the issue of one-stop-shops we are trying to work towards our second quarter deadline of having a one-stop shop in place. The form it will take will be in trying to make our online facilities more navigable and more user friendly for the public. Since the rental strategy was published, our daily call rate has increased from 600 calls per day to 900. This is a huge increase and it shows the demand for information within the area. We also want to look at support services with web chat facilities available and, looking at the demographic of our tenants, they tend to be younger they like to do things online via the web. For our landlord cohort, which tends to be slightly older, we are also looking at extending our phone line hours. We have a traditional public service by phone from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. We want to see if we can be more public friendly in stretching that out. We are working towards these measures and the re-launch of our website will take some work, so we are working towards the second quarter deadline. In the meantime, we are trying to keep up with our call pace as it comes in at the moment.