Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Senator and I agree on much more than we sometimes like to pretend. He is factually entirely correct. Student accommodation is the biggest cost that students are facing. The SUSI review shows this. On borrowing, to be clear, I want to thank the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien for working very closely with us on the whole issue of student accommodation; the borrowing framework can now be accessed by our technological universities through the Housing Finance Agency. Of course, as I said in answer to an earlier question, for obvious reasons they do not have a lot of experience in drawing this down so we need to build a collective sense of confidence around it. There is no legal impediment today to that and we are very much open.

I delivered this message to a technological university yesterday in the context of receiving applications and pilot projects in terms of student accommodation for technological universities.

On the Senator's broader question, my view and, I believe, that of the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, although I will not speak for him, is that we need to come up with a new model for student accommodation. It is very tricky to come up with a new model but we need to do so. We have many planning permissions granted to build on-campus student accommodation. The challenge is that they are not being built in a way that is affordable and, therefore, in some cases they are not being built because they cannot be built and rented at an affordable level. My officials and I are considering several matters in very close work with the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, and his officials. There are exciting ideas in the pipeline. An example of that relates to the Government announcement in respect of helping people to build apartments and whether there is a variation of that which could be used to help bridge that funding gap for some of our institutions. The Minister, Deputy O'Brien, and I are hoping to bottom out some of these options in the coming weeks.