Mr. Niall Byrne:

I thank the Deputy. If I can put it this way, a core concern for the RTB is that everything that should be registered is registered. That is the definition of the effective register to be held by the RTB for all of the purposes for which it is used. We are very focused on that now, and more focused than the RTB has been heretofore. I have already mentioned our statement of strategy for 2023 to 2025, which is in the pack. That is called out as one of the core areas for attention. That is what drives a lot of our other activities.

We have to make sure that everything is in place to be able to say that the register can be trusted to be comprehensive, maintained in an accurate way, and kept up to date. There are lots of challenges in making that happen because it is a particular kind of register. It is a self-declare register. There are no checks imposed by the RTB before a tenancy is registered. Landlords go on to our online site and they register the tenancy, so there are no barriers to entry as such. It is a register that, by definition, will always have degrees of inaccuracy built into it but it is highly important that the RTB is focused on doing everything it can to ensure it is as accurate as it can be.

Everything we do on the technology side, including developing the systems, is part of making that happen. I mention everything we do to develop new sources of information to underpin the register, whether that comes from the HAP service centre or local authorities, and we are in discussions with the Revenue Commissioners about much richer data that could potentially come to us from Revenue records coming from the form 11 tax returns. All of that underpins the register. We welcome the opportunity to engage with the CSO on the analysis of the data because we are concerned to understand what is going on here as well and we will be interested to see what comes through at the end of that exercise.

Also then, in an integrated way, all of our compliance work is directed towards that same end to underpin the register. Heretofore the RTB's policy around compliance would have been to react to incoming information which suggested that properties were not registered. The RTB did not have any proactive compliance-type programmes, such as one sees in lots of other public bodies where proactive compliance is the bedrock on which regulatory bodies operate. That development is really only happening now in the RTB. That is a primary focus for us going into 2024. We had ambitions to move that work forward much more in the last 12 months. Ms Crimin’s post was originally intended to do exactly that and she was to be our head of compliance. However, because of issues we ran into with the registration system that had to be prioritised, Ms Crimin, among many other colleagues, and I ended up having to put a huge amount of our time and effort into remedying the registration issues.

Happily, we are now coming out of that time so we can return to some of these other concerns which are equally important. We are committed to building a much more proactive compliance approach that is based on data, led by risk and involves proactive engagement with the register itself and the sector. That has to be built; it is not something that arrives ready-made or that can be imported from another public body, although lessons can be learned from other public bodies. Our commitment is to move away from the reactive and into the proactive. If we were to come back to the committee this time next year, assuming we do not run into circumstances where our efforts are unexpectedly diverted into other areas in the next 12 months, we would be in a position to give the committee a lot of assurance on the effects of that work and what the benefits flowing from it would be.

This is not to be seen as something separate related only to prosecutions and that kind of thing; it is also about developing the protective functions of the RTB. The RTB does not really have a protective function, as it were, although sometimes it is assumed that we do. It is also sometimes assumed that we are all-seeing and all-knowing as regards the entirety of the residential rental sector but that is not the case either. Our focus and function are to register tenancies and if there is no tenancy, the RTB does not have any role or remit. We are keen to build out the RTB in the future and to build the agenda around effective and proportionate regulation.

We must also recognise that there are many good landlords in the sector. A lot of our research supports that view and most of the time things work quite well for most tenants and landlords. That is good and we should not lose sight of it. There are definitely some bad actors in the sector who are only interested in exploiting potentially vulnerable people, evading their responsibilities and exploiting loopholes in the law. For this reason, we have to have a parallel track to make sure those serious bad-intentioned actors are dealt with by the RTB. The RTB's current capacity to do that is not anywhere near as developed as it should be but we are clear that this has to happen, alongside supporting those people who wish to comply to actually comply. There are lots of reasons people forget or get confused.

There are many older people in the residential rental sector. We see this in the data. Many people who struggle with compliance requirements are not trying to be non-compliant but are accidentally becoming so. We are also committed to having an education and supportive function to encourage and support those people to comply.

It is about coming at it in an integrated, joined-up way. I think we are now in a position to do that. We thought we would have been in that position last year but that did not turn out to be case. We will publish our business plan for 2024 on our website so there is public accountability around these objectives at the start of 2024, assuming the RTB board signs off on it in December, which is what we expect.