Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I am not just an individual Minister who is saying he would like to do something about student accommodation and asking whether somebody should do something about it. Thankfully, it is more than that. At a Cabinet committee on housing in July, I think, the Taoiseach and I strongly put forward the view that there was a need for an intervention and the Taoiseach provided his imprimatur for this to happen. Since then, we have been working on developing proposals for how we can unlock or unstick, in the first instance, universities that have planning permission today. This is not a critical comment on them; far from it. It has not been viable for them to build. We will be returning to the Cabinet committee on housing this month and then, ultimately, to the Cabinet to try to press "Go". I imagine it may be done project by project. Affordability will be an element. We cannot have a situation where the State is paying money and is agnostic on the issue of affordability. I will not read out the entire list of those with whom we are working closely. I can share the list with the committee. There are five traditional universities today with planning permissions to build. If you look at the totality of that, you are talking about a significant number of beds that could be built. Will all these beds be built for 2023? Of course they will not. That is not what the Senator is asking. If we are to move beyond the annual September crisis around student accommodation, at some point somebody has to take the bull by the horns and try a new model; that is what we are going to do.

The second piece will have to involve the technological universities. The Senator will be familiar with the position in the south east. With the exception of the former Waterford Institute of Technology, they have never built a student accommodation bed. I am not being critical of them because they had not been allowed to do so under the borrowing framework. We have now clarified under the borrowing framework that they can. When we met the chairs of the governing authorities, our message to them was to get ready and begin to prepare their plans. That will be coupled with the new student accommodation strategy. I expect that in this calendar year, we can make progress on what the policy intervention looks like and that in 2023, we can make progress on delivering some of these projects.