Nine years after law was passed, Government still has to set up rental deposit scheme

Commitments were also made to establish a  rental deposit scheme within the 2020 Programme for Government, alongside the coalition’s flagship Housing for All policy document.

The Government is yet to allow renter deposits to be held securely by the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB), despite laws allowing for it being passed almost nine years ago.

In December 2015, legislation was passed that would have allowed the RTB to hold deposits within a “designated tenancy deposit account”.

In effect, this means that landlords would have had to hand over deposits to the RTB, where it would hold them, and any interest generated by the deposits would be used to help operate both the scheme and the RTB as a whole.

At the end of a tenancy, if there is an agreement between both the landlord and tenant, the deposit is returned to the renter. However, if there is a dispute, the two parties can resolve it through the RTB.

Commitments were also made to establish such a scheme within the 2020 Programme for Government, alongside the coalition’s flagship Housing for All policy document.

Within Housing for All, the target for examining the proposal was in Q2 2023, meanwhile a parliamentary question from last December set a completion date as Q4 2023.

When asked about the current status of the proposal, a spokesperson for the Department of Housing said that the Housing Agency is continuing to examine the possibility of a rental deposit scheme, however without any indication of when this would be completed.

On the yet-to-be-commenced deposit scheme under the 2015 legislation, the spokesperson cited the changes to the rental market in the intervening years as a reason the scheme had not come into effect.

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“The Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Act 2015 provided for the development of a deposit protection scheme to be operated by the Residential Tenancies Board. However, significant changes have taken place in the rental market since this Act,” the spokesperson said.

Threshold, a charity advocating for tenants, says that the legislation that allowed for a rental deposit scheme to be introduced — the Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Act 2015 — is cumbersome and would require reform for an effective scheme to be set up.

However, Eoin Ó Broin, Sinn Féin’s housing spokesperson, said that the scheme set out under the 2015 Act should be enacted by the Government. He cautioned the Government against handing a deposit scheme over to a private company to be run for profit, saying it would be better if the RTB were able to avail of funds gathered through interest.