Ms Louise Loughlin:

I did not say that. I said we are examining all this at the moment. What we have in our business plan for this year is to publish our processing times from the third quarter of this year. Over the course of this quarter, we will publish the processing times for the previous quarter on our website. We have talked about being within striking distance there on mediation. We will move towards publishing those processing times. The rationale for publishing this information is that the current situation is a bit opaque in terms of what the public can expect from the RTB in respect of how long a wait there will be for a case to be processed. The idea is that we will work towards achieving these timelines as set out with our parent Department. There is quite a bit of work to do in terms of really understanding this aspect.

One thing that needs to be borne in mind here is that it is a quasi-judicial process. If we think about adjudication, in particular, timelines are set down in the legislation and then reasonable timeframes must be given for people to do things like producing their evidence and papers.