Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. Her points on digs are fair and measured. It genuinely is a matter of balancing the imperative to maximise the accommodation available to students with ensuring students are safe and treated with respect and dignity. Renting a room is working for thousands of students every year. I hear that from students but I also know purely from the numbers that go through the system with Revenue and the like. I am still concerned that if we got into formal regulation, the downside would be people saying they will not bother renting out the spare room. That is the balance. However, that is not a reason to say we should not be doing everything we can to support and help students. One of the things we are looking at this year is trying to ensure there is a less rushed approach. Between Covid, delayed leaving certificate results and the college year moving, many students find out where they are going at the last minute and there is then a huge scramble to try to find accommodation. That there will be earlier leaving certificate results this year helps. We are going to have a co-ordinated campaign this year around digs. It will be a public awareness campaign on what they are and how they work. We are also going to try to work much more closely with the universities to compile offers in order that people know where to go to find more reputable information. I would like to get to a point where we have national guidelines on digs, so people know what they are signing up to, what is expected of a person renting out a room and what a person renting a room should expect. I will reflect on what the Deputy has said and see how quickly we can get to the point of some form of national guidelines.

On the shovel-ready projects, I will send the committee a note so as to give accurate figures. As the Deputy will know, we have already approved Maynooth, the University of Limerick, UL, Galway and Dublin City University, DCU, to proceed with accommodation. These are projects that were shovel-ready and were stalled as they were viewed as unviable. There are 1,100 units in those four projects. There are about another thousand units that have planning permission between UCD, Trinity and UCC. I am expecting to make progress on the next tranche shortly and will keep members updated on that. I expect to return to Cabinet before the summer recess on what more can be done on that. Information available to us is we have about 2,000 student accommodation rooms under construction in the private sector. We expect that approximately 1,800 additional student accommodation beds have been delivered since the last academic year. That is a high-level view but I am happy to provide a more detailed note to the committee. I want to be in a position where every project that has planning permission is moving and it is realistic to be in that position quite shortly. We are intensifying our discussions - people are engaging in good faith - with UCD, Trinity and UCC and we met the Irish Universities Association on this yesterday.