Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I will speak mainly about student housing if that is okay. I am conscious it is only one part of the subject but if the Minister cannot answer questions I have today, we could revisit them in future statements. To follow Senator O'Sullivan's point on investors buying a fifth of the available housing, I read somewhere that every time a bomb is dropped in Syria there is a flight of capital to London. I cannot imagine there are wealthy people who would come to Dublin for a party once a year and leave the house for the rest of the year but I wonder if there are broader parallels that the Department could examine between Dublin and London, particularly in the Brexit context.

When most of us consider student housing, we think of times when we were younger and living in accommodation not close to the standards we are used to today. The expectation in standards of student housing has been particularly low for some time before any accommodation crisis. It is a sector with rogue landlords who shirk their responsibility to provide adequate standards of living and attempt to manipulate an age cohort that might not be as comfortable or experienced in asserting their tenancy rights. I spent a short time in Galway but the accommodation I saw had issues like black mould, draughts, damp, a lack of insulation and a number of repair or maintenance issues that a landlord may refuse to deal with. Many of us may look back with fondness on our times as students but we should not lower our expectations for standards of accommodation based on age or some sort of nostalgic right of passage. We are in a rental crisis but it is no time for us to absolve ourselves of having adequate standards. I am sure the Minister agrees with that.

It is more important than ever to realise and actively promote tenancy rights as our younger renters are more vulnerable at this time. The most pressing matter I have seen with young renters is either a portion of or the entire deposit being unfairly retained by a landlord when a young person leaves accommodation in the summer after exams. The Department has been aware of this practice for some time and has formulated a deposit retention scheme; the Department announced its intention to roll out such a scheme in September 2017. That has yet to happen and I wonder if the Minister could progress this in time for September 2018, when student renters will move into new properties and pay deposits to new landlords.

There is no doubt that student renters are hit by the crisis. Our students are engaging in personal development and career advancement. They are faced with higher fees, rising rents, sometimes part-time and precarious work, as well as escalating costs of living. The student accommodation sector, like the entire rental sector, is rife with those who seek to take advantage of the lack of supply and proposed extortionate rates. Inevitably, the average rent per room is driven up in the vicinity of our third level institutions. This is done outside of rent pressure zones and, in many cases, in direct defiance of those zones. I wish the Department well in its endeavours to clamp down on that.

Purpose-built student accommodation is, however, outside rent pressure zones and is beyond the remit of the Residential Tenancies Board. This issue has come to prominence with the Dublin City University student union holding a protest outside Leinster House as just one part of its action in the "Shanowen shakedown" campaign. Rents are to be increased by 27% to €9,000 for the next academic year, working out at approximately €1,000 per month per room for student accommodation. It is completely unsustainable and it is cruel and greedy of the landlords involved. Over 50% of DCU students receive a maintenance grant and therefore their families simply cannot afford €250 per week on accommodation along with all the other costs of living in a city and dealing with education.

Deputy Eoin Ó Broin is currently drafting legislation that would bring purpose-built student accommodation into the rent pressure zone process in order to give students some certainty about their rent. Will the Minister give an indication of his plans to deal effectively with this as the current position is untenable? Every year in which the loophole is not close we leave the most vulnerable people locked out of the rental market.