Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke, to the House. I hope we can have a respectful and robust debate on the planning and student accommodation crisis. The student accommodation crisis is affecting students throughout Ireland. Third-level education is becoming less accessible every year because of continual rent increases and hikes in the cost of living. Owing to rent increases and a lack of suitable accommodation, young people are staying in hotels with no access to proper cooking facilities, often having to get up in the middle of the night to commute for hours for a 9 a.m. lecture. Students from low- or middle-income backgrounds will be completely locked out of third level education away from home because of the cost of high rents.

In 2017, the Government published its student accommodation strategy to tackle purpose-built student accommodation and the lack of it. It sounded good, but the strategy borrowed heavily from the Fine Gael approach to housing, that is, that the private sector will provide and prioritise the provision of luxury high-cost student accommodation rather than affordable student accommodation. The only tangible mention of affordable housing in the strategy was confirmation towards the end of it that Part V of the Planning and Development Act, which relates to social and affordable housing, did not apply to purpose-built student accommodation. For the property developer or investor the attraction to student accommodation was that standards were lower than for apartments and there was no requirement to provide the 10% social and affordable housing. Some of what was built was of good quality and was an enhancement of what were previously derelict sites. That was welcome, but I had never been convinced that the intention on the developer side was to provide student accommodation in the long term.

In my area, there were applications to close what had been promised public spaces, followed by applications to turn the student accommodation into tourist accommodation for the summer term, from May to October. When co-living briefly became the favoured planning route for developers, Point Campus was granted change of use from student to co-living accommodation. For somebody who represented one of the areas where so much student accommodation was being built, there was a glaring contrast between the large number of student accommodation applications being submitted as compared with applications for apartments even though we are in the middle of a housing crisis. Like the ghost estates that blighted this country during the late 2000s, it had the feel of a speculation bubble. These luxury student accommodation complexes boast facilities such as cinemas, bowling alleys, 24-7 gyms and rooftop terraces. One of the complexes in Dublin 8 that applied for change of use was advertising rooms starting at €305 per week, which amounts to €1,200 per month. To put that in context, the SUSI grant for those not living near college is €3,025 per annum or €252 per month before the student eats, travels or buys a book. What good was a pool table or a rooftop terrace bar when students did not have enough money to put food on the dinner table?

The real purpose behind what was happening became clear as student accommodation providers took the opportunity of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, even though there were hints of it happening previously. In my area of Dublin 8, The Tannery on Mill Street applied for a temporary change of use on the basis that Covid had impacted the number of international students attending third level. This was despite that at the time Government had made an additional 2,000 places available to compensate for the drop-off. Incredibly, the developer argued that the tourism market was recovering, unlike the student market. This was just as we were entering a level 3 lockdown.

Another Dublin 8 provider applied to change student accommodation into tourist accommodation for the academic year 2021-22 once students were returned to campus. Councillor Darragh Moriarty and I submitted an objection arguing that this, as in the case of the Mill Street application, created a bad precedent. In another part of the city, Uninest was allowed to convert 571 student beds into tourist accommodation. The Minister belatedly responded to the outcry on this issue by issuing a circular to planning authorities with guidance on dealing with change-of-use applications. The circular issued to the planning authorities was and is weak, vague and full of get-out clauses. For example, it provides that developers should be able to demonstrate that there is no longer a need for such use in the area in question. For an area like Dublin 8 where, along with Dublin 1 and Dublin 7, a large amount of student accommodation has been built over the past number of years, there is no large student population or institution and, therefore, a case could be made that it is not needed in that area. Why then allow so many to be built in that small area?

This Bill seeks a ban of 15 years on the conversion of purpose-built student accommodation to residential or tourist accommodation. We also do not want to see lower standard co-living by the backdoor. There needs to be a clear line in the sand on this issue. Developers need to be told that they cannot game the planning system to make greater profits elsewhere. If the demand is not there at current prices, the student accommodation providers should reduce their prices. It is not the responsibility of a planning system to underpin a high-yield business model. Long term, we need to base our response to the student accommodation crisis in the reality of life for a student, which includes making sure that the options we provide are affordable for those expected to be in full-time education and reliant, as some of them are, on the SUSI grant. That means cost-rental student accommodation. It can be done with third level institutions or student unions set up as approved housing bodies, AHBs, but the accommodation must be local to the colleges students are attending and it must be affordable. I hope Government Members and the Minister of State will support my Bill because this is an issue on which we should all be united. Student accommodation needs to remain as student accommodation. We should not allow developers to game the planning system when it does not suit them.