Professor Veronica Campbell:

I will take that. We are very grateful in the South East Technological University for the 432 beds we have. The reason we have them is a transaction from 20 years ago, well before SETU was established. The company that developed those beds was consolidated into the legacy institute of technology at the time. There was a financial transaction and arrangement put in place at that time. When SETU was established in 2022, that fully owned subsidiary of the former institute of technology was incorporated into SETU.

On the question about how quickly could we move if the borrowing framework was approved tomorrow, we are very cognisant of good and proper governance and a viable business case. An updated financial analysis would need to be done. As is usual in these circumstances, once the funding mechanism and instrument is fully bottomed out and approved through our governance ladder, we would then go out to tender for a single point design team, there would be a tender process and a design process. That could move quite quickly because we talked about rapid build and modular build and it is quite straightforward from a design perspective. We have already had some indicative feasibility designs done as well that would help inform that. There is then the tender phase for the construction element as well. You could be looking at two years, maybe a little bit more or maybe a little bit less, from the approval of a business case. It is not an immediate solution but to have that direction of travel would be hugely beneficial for all of our technological universities.