Sir, – As a tenant I wish to endorse Catherine Morrissey's view that "tenant rights are in dire need of attention" in relation to a landlord's legal obligation of giving just 28 days' notice of a 40 per cent rent increase (February 24th).
In the absence of political will to impose rent controls, it may be beneficial to secure six-months’ notice of a rent increase and to restrict all such increases to March or April every year.
This would reduce the danger of people falling homeless when trying to balance an increased rent demand with higher fuel costs through the winter.
This would also give tenants thinking about challenging a rent increase the comfort of knowing that their case would be adjudicated by the Private Residential Tenancies Board (which has a waiting list of up to four months) before an actual increase falls due and remove the possibility of becoming homeless due to an insufficiency of funds required to reimburse a landlord if the increase is adjudged justified.
The rental market is controlled by property owners, and as “the central role of the PRTB is to support the rental housing market” (mission statement on prtb.ie), there is a strong case to establish an independent agency to represent tenants’ interests. Otherwise the PRTB will continue to find itself as an apologist for an inadequate legal framework that hinders both sustainability and fairness in the rental market. – Yours, etc,
CIARAN WALSH,
Donard,
Co Wicklow.