Universities need to develop an affordable rent strategy, fast.
Across the UK, thousands of university students across 25 campuses prepared for a wave of rent strikes last weekend. Rents have increased by an eye-watering 20% in 2 years, and the spiralling cost of accommodation is making higher education unaffordable for students of lower-income families.
Used as a bargaining chip against extortionate rents, the Rent Strike Weekender Event rode on the success at UCL where 1,000 students withheld payments as part of a five month dispute. After the five months, UCL management were forced to back off and students secured rent freezes, and a £350,000 bursary was distributed to disadvantaged students.
So, the rent strike won’t - fingers crossed - be a hopeless repeat of 2010 uni-fees-raised-to-9-grand student demonstration doomed to failure, then. There is hope. And with 50% of students unable to afford basic rent and bills, according to National Union of Students figures, something needs to happen soon. Shelly Asquith, vice president for welfare of NUS describes rent strikes as a key tactic to obtaining a new rental system. The NUS’s solution? They’ve proposed that 25% of all university bed spaces should be offered at 50% of the maximum amount of maintenance loan available.
Martin Blakey, chief executive of student housing charity Unipol, blames university’s constant expanding of high-end studio flats and accommodation for pricing students out. It’s not hard to see why. In Nottingham, out of 800 new rooms built, 650 of those are studio flats - thus, markedly more expensive. The trends aren’t driven by student demand, but by how much money universities project they’ll make from accommodation. In the last academic year, students on average pay £226 per week in London and £134 per week in the rest of the UK. It’s crazy money, if you think these are full-time students who haven’t even started working yet.
'If you look at London it’s really the eye of the storm and it’s a warning story of what might happen elsewhere,' Blakey explains, '… quite often institutions just don’t notice a lot of their accommodation is getting very expensive.'
So, like most things, it seems it has to get worse before it gets better. Let’s just hope the lows we're feeling about accommodation - and the ones our bank balances are suffering for that matter - are now worse enough for universities to notice.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.