One-bed en suites for students ‘wasteful’, says Minister for Higher Education James Lawless – The Irish Times

Students having a bathroom each would be “wasteful”, and the Government is moving towards a co-living model involving communal space for university accommodation, Minister for Further and Higher Education James Lawless has said.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Irish Times, the Minister also said he is close to signing off on a proposal to set rent increases every three years, rather than after the end of a tenancy, for student accommodation.

Many prospective students have been forced to defer courses or change their university preference because of a lack of supply of housing and a high cost of rent in student accommodation. Mr Lawless said that under new building standards for student accommodation that he brought forward last year, the Government is trying to “produce more rooms for the same floor space”, including more shared facilities.

Asked if this would be similar to a “co-living” model, Mr Lawless agreed. “I’m not talking about forcing students on top of each other.”

While there would be an “option” for students to share double or triple rooms, “it’s not going to be mandatory”.

He said: “If we have 10 individual rooms, and each gets an en suite, that seems quite wasteful to me. We could have probably 20 student beds in the same space, with maybe five shared bathrooms.”

New rent regulations, which would allow landlords to reset rents between tenancies, are due to come into effect from March. Mr Lawless said he was concerned that students “would be facing a rent reset every single year”. The Minister says he is now considering linking rent increases to the property, rather than the tenancy, to only allow one rent increase every three years. Mr Lawless said rent changes were one way to offer “simplicity and certainty” to the market.

“And I know students and maybe the Opposition don’t like to talk about those terms, but it is a reality, because who builds houses? Ultimately, pension funds build houses … the money that comes to build them is capital flooding the international markets looking for a home.

“[Housing] is about international markets. It’s actually a spreadsheet in Zurich or New York or Antwerp, more so than a builder looking at a site in Longford or Roscommon, that’s actually deciding what happens here.”