Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 13 October 2021
1. Deputy Rose Conway-Walsh asked the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science the steps that have been taken to address the student accommodation crisis; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [49752/21]
View answerFirst, I want to warmly congratulate the Minister and his wife, Caoimhe, on the birth of your son, Cillian. As the mother of two boys, I know the great joy that can bring and I wish you all well.
The student accommodation emergency is now at crisis point. I am being contacted by students and families with real-life stories of travelling up to seven hours a day to attend college because they cannot afford accommodation near the place where they study. Students are couch-surfing and staying in hotels and in overcrowded accommodation. That is the reality, but it is not normal in 2021. What specific measures have the Minister and the Government taken to address this crisis?
I thank the Deputy for her kind wishes, which I sincerely appreciate. I thank her also for raising this extremely important issue. At the outset, while it is a statement of the obvious, it is important to say that a lot of the issues affecting students are part of the broader housing challenges that we face as a society, and these are challenges the Government is committed to resolving. The Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, is leading on our behalf with our new Housing for All strategy, which involves all Government Departments stepping up to the plate and doing everything we possibly can to increase housing supply.
We have taken a number of actions, working with students and, indeed, with the Deputy and this House on proposals that have come forward to try to improve the situation. For example, the Deputy would have supported legislation and would have introduced legislation to ask us to change the rules around deposits for students where students were being asked to pay, in my view, ridiculous levels of up-front deposits. We changed the law on that together, as an Oireachtas, and those changes have come in. The second thing we were asked to do was to change the notice periods so students would only have to give 28 days notice if they had to give up accommodation, for whatever reason, and we did that together as well. The third thing we were asked to do was to change the borrowing frameworks to make sure institutes of technology and technological universities, including colleges in the Deputy’s region such as Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, could start to access finance for the first time and to borrow. We have made that change in Housing for All and perhaps we can get into that in more detail shortly. We have also increased the student assistance fund, which can be used for students to meet bills they cannot otherwise afford, including rent, and we have put a record amount of funding into that student assistance fund.
We introduced a circular or, to be specific, the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, introduced a circular in regard to making sure student accommodation is used for just that purpose of student accommodation. I am sure the Deputy and I can both agree that the snide, flippant and sarcastic comments of a senior official in recent days really showed a lack of understanding of the seriousness of that situation. Our circular is very clear in what we want to do and expect to do in that regard. The changes we made in the budget yesterday in regard to the non-adjacent grant will also help many students to see an increase in their grant of up to €2,000 as a result of the distance rules.
There is more that we want to do and more that we are doing, and I will get into that in my supplementary response.
I thank the Minister. I think Owen Keegan’s comments were more than a lack of understanding. I think it was absolute contempt for the students and for the situation they are in. I hope the Minister will join with me in asking for his resignation. I am going to join students today when they are demonstrating at 1 p.m. outside Dublin City Council to make their feelings known on this. I was absolutely shocked, in all honesty. When Seán in my office contacted me about it, I said: “You can’t re-tweet that” and “You can’t relay that. That has to be wrong”. Nobody in that position could say such a thing, could think such a thing. It is absolutely disgusting.
I have a copy of a letter from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage to our local authorities and county councils. It just says there is a critical need for student accommodation, which obviously is true, and that local authorities and An Bord Pleanála must be satisfied there are good reasons for the transfer of student accommodation to tourism. That is an extremely weak response, particularly as it is a circular. That was sent around in 2016. We are now in 2021 and this is what is happening in terms of the conversion of student accommodation. It has to stop.
I do not wish the Deputy in any way to think my language is not strong enough in regard to Mr. Keegan’s comments because I find them absolutely reprehensible, I really do. It shows a real failure to understand the serious challenge that people are facing. It also shows complete and utter disrespect to students. The Deputy and I might not agree on everything but what we do agree on is working with students on a number of issues, and we have made progress on some matters. If we are to find solutions to these things, it is going to involve collaborating, working with student unions, working with colleges and listening to them. The idea that one of our most senior officials in our capital city would just dismiss their views with flippant, sarcastic language is, quite frankly, contemptuous.
Last week, we had a meeting between my Department, the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and all the college representative bodies. We basically said that under the Housing for All principles, there is now an opportunity for people to start borrowing to build college-owned student accommodation and not just be reliant on the market, and we invited them to bring forward proposals. I am very excited by the pipeline of proposals that the colleges have. I am due to meet the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, next week to further this. I and the Minister are due to visit Dublin City University because the president of DCU made some very interesting and constructive comments about the cost of building and the implication that is having for some of the universities in our larger cities. I expect to be in a position to work with the sector to bring forward, in what is a very significant policy shift, a very large building programme of college-owned student accommodation, as opposed to the policies of the past, which had been too reliant on the private sector.
We are in the middle of an emergency and a crisis. I appreciate that the Minister says those things will be done. However, we had a chance to stop the conversion of student accommodation in 2016 and the Government did not do that. Those in the Government need to have a bit of humility, hold up their hands and say, “We did not act although we could have seen this coming as we knew we were going to be in this situation this year”. For the students who are now travelling for hours, couch-surfing, living in overcrowded accommodation or paying for hotels, all of these measures are not going to solve their problems in the coming weeks and months. We need to sit down and then send out a very strong message to those who are converting student accommodation that they need to make more student accommodation available and use it for the purpose it was meant for. We need to do everything we possibly can to ensure these students are safely accommodated because without the accommodation, they cannot access third level education.
I have already outlined to the Deputy some of the immediate measures we are taking to try to help in the here and now around financial assistance, around the student assistance fund and around the circular. That circular, which the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien issued, is very strong and makes very clear that student accommodation during the college year should be just for student accommodation. We also need to look at how we can get back to promoting the initiative where people can avail of renting a room, and there is some tax-free income that people can benefit from. There probably was an impact from Covid in that regard, which did not help the situation this year.
I have a whole folder here and I can give the Deputy a load of statistics about how the supply has increased or about how there is more purpose-built student accommodation now than ever before. I am not going to waste the House’s time reading that out because it misses the point. It suggests that I think everything is okay and I certainly do not. It is my position and the position of the Government that we need a significant policy shift when it comes to college accommodation and student accommodation, and that is what I am going to deliver with the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, and with the technological universities, the institutes of technology and the universities in the coming weeks and months. I accept there are lead-in times to all of these things but it is still the right thing to do. I cannot just engage in short-termism. I need to look at how we can get college-owned student accommodation built, not just in our capital city but also in the regions and with a particular focus on the new technological universities.
