Mr. Niall Byrne:

I will comment on the Deputy's question, and then my colleague, Ms Crimin, whose has responsibility for registration, can explain where we are regarding current performance. Much of that was going on in the autumn of last year and into the first part of this year. That has been significantly reduced, so that now that is very much the exception rather than the norm. Unfortunately, this time last year, that kind of experience was somewhat the norm for a lot of people but we have worked extremely hard with our colleagues on the customer service functions we provide and by investing in our information technology, IT, system so that the system itself provides a better service, and people can navigate it successfully.

I have apologised extensively to all stakeholder interest groups since last year. It is not part of my function or role to make people's lives a misery. In fact, it is our role to facilitate compliance with the registration requirements by putting in place systems that work and facilitate compliance by the people who are willing to comply. That is absolutely our core concern. Everything that we have been doing has been directed towards that. Unfortunately, not everything that was in our system last year regarding how the system performed allowed that to happen. Hence, people ran into these difficulties.

I have dealt with a lot of these. Many of them have come to me, so I have that experience. I got one just this week, and I said to my colleagues that I did not understand what was going on that this was still be happening, where a particular type of landlord wanted to register a number of properties and seemed to have got involved in an endless loop that was leading to intense frustration. We have since worked through that one and sorted it out.

At a level of policy, that is our commitment, and notwithstanding what the Deputy said, we can show, and our data demonstrate, that we have largely overcome those problems that were very prominent this time last year.

Some of those data are in the briefing document that went to the committee. There is a particular graph in there. I will ask my colleague Ms Crimin to give a bit more detail on that, if that is okay with the Deputy.