Ms Rosalind Carroll:

I will start with Deputy Jan O'Sullivan's questions. Our statistic on the deposit retention scheme is 92% as the Deputy said. As an organisation, previously we only had the statistics on what was coming into us but not what was found beneath that. We often see applications coming in and people will tick every box because they are afraid of not ticking a box. Therefore, applications are not really a good demonstration of what the actual dispute underneath it all might be. As much as we can, where we get to a hearing, we have started to find out what the issue was and what the result of that was. We have specifically looked at notices of termination and we have been looking at that data since 2017 for the first time. From that, we found that where notices of termination are served for rent arrears, 78% of them are found to be valid. Where notices are served for sale, only 50% of them are found to be valid. Where they are served for a landlord requiring them for their use or for their family members, 48% of them are found to be valid. We can share this information with members afterwards. For substantial refurbishments, 74% are found to be invalid. I know that both of the members have made proposals on the refurbishment issue, but I would say that where cases are coming before us, the law that is there does work. This question of getting people to come forward with cases has shown that many of the cases are found to be invalid when they come through and they do not meet the threshold of substantial refurbishment in the type of cases that are coming before us. As I said, we are happy to share those statistics. We are collating our 2018 statistics and they will be available within the next few weeks and we can get those to the committee as well.

On the complexity of the Bill, we feel that is one of the biggest issues with regulating the sector because people simply do not know what they should be doing. Every time we bring in a new law, what normally happens is that we get more non-compliance. I would say there are different categories of landlords and tenants out there. There are people who knowingly do not comply and then there are people who are just not getting it right and we are trying to support the people who are trying to get it right. In terms of the sanctions, hopefully the new legislation will give us the power, a bit like they have in the Revenue framework. In that framework, Revenue works with the people who are trying to comply but if people do not engage they are treated in a much harsher fashion. It gives us a whole new framework in which we can deliver. Having said that, the Bill that is coming before us is still adding complexity; we would also like to see a new Bill but there is a balance between how we just get something in place now to deal with some of the non-compliance around rent pressure zones and so on. If we start rewriting it I suspect it would be another two or three years before we get anything moving on it. The balance between all of this is that at this point, we would like to just get some of this legislation in place and for us to get some of the new powers.

In many circumstances in the current market it is onerous to be a tenant and it is onerous to be a landlord. What I would be very keen on from our perspective, is for everyone to have an awareness that we need a diversity of our landlords. The smaller landlords in Ireland have played an important part in price control because small landlords have personal relationships with their tenants and they often do not charge the maximum rent. As they get to know their tenants over time, they might take account that there might be a communion on or whatever event happens to be taking place and they have a personal relationship so for me, we need to make sure that whatever frameworks we put in place allow for that diversity over time. At the moment we have that diversity but it is starting to change in some areas.