The Great Accommodation Rip-off?


The NUS and housing charity Unipol collaborate every few years to release their Accommodation Costs Survey, that looks at the cost of housing for students nationally.

Their most recent survey, the 2009-10 version, notes an astonishing 22% increase in housing costs over the past three years; a lot of this upward push comes from the private sector.

The survey takes into account on-campus halls, partnerships between universities and private providers, and the private sector proper. For a copy of the report, click here. For more info, see the BBC article and the NUS news article on the topic, or the presentation below.

Do you think you’re being charged too much for what you’re getting? Do you think your rent is at a fair level? Do you think that rents are going up too much? The university currently makes a loss on accommodation, but have a look at some of the facts and judge for yourself...

Average rent (per week) at other plate-glass universities
Essex  £79.09
 UEA  £85.68
Lancaster  £87.90
 Sussex  £96.42
 Warwick  £96.56

The term "plate glass university" applies to those universities set up in the 1960s in lieu of the Robbins Report on higher education. We think these are a fair group to compare costs with, due to the relative ages of accommodation blocks. Note, all universities listed above are campus universities out of main towns and cities, to ensure a fair comparison. The "average" is worked out by taking the rents for each hall, and weighting the average by the amount of people per hall.

Rent increases at Warwick
Academic Year Loan % Rootes % Rootes ± RPI JM % JM ± RPI AV % AV ± RPI RPI Warwick Accomm %
 2005/06  2.44  3.28 0.18 2.38 -0.72 3.49 0.39 3.10 3.10
 2006/07  5.01  11.11  7.20  9.30  5.39  8.99  5.08  3.91 10.2
 2007/08  2.38  10.00  5.90  10.64  6.54  10.31  6.21  4.10 10.2
 2008/09  2.55  5.19  4.48  7.69  6.97  7.48  6.76  0.72 6.4
 2009/10  2.50  30.00  29.31  6.25  5.56  6.09  5.40  0.69 18.5
 2010/11  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?

This table is a bit complicated, but give it a chance.

  • The "Loan %" column is the rate at which student loans had increased since the last academic year
  • The "[accommodation block] %" columns are the increases in total rent for a certain accommodation block since the last academic year
  • The "± RPI" columns are charting the difference between the rent increase against inflation - a positive number means it's above inflation, and a negative number means it's below inflation (the inflation measure used here is the RPI)
  • The "Warwick Accomm %" column gives a weighted average from the three halls listed here (Rootes, Jack Martin and Arthur Vick) of rent changes from the last academic year.

 
 

 

Percentage of student loan taken by rent

Academic Year Loan Rootes % of loan JM % of loan AV % of loan
 2005/06 £4195 45.05 61.50 63.65
 2006/07 £4405 47.67 64.02 66.06
 2007/08 £4510 51.22 69.18 71.18
 2008/09 £4625 52.54 72.65 74.59
 2009/10 £4950 66.18 72.12 73.94
 2010/11 ? ? ? ?

The "loan" referred to here is the full amount of maintenance loan that people can get: the basic part, and the means-tested part. The basic part, which is what a lot of students get, is 75% of the loan figure listed. Also, remember that these percentages would differ for other halls: cheaper halls would be a lower ratio, but halls like Tocil would be a much larger proportion.

So what has the Union done about this?

We received feedback from 84 students about the issues raised here, via the feedback form we put up. The opposition to increases came from all years and all backgrounds (thought there was a small minority which thought that the raises were fair). Three of us attended the University's Student Rents Working Party meeting at the end of Term 1 - armed with your feedback, we took them the simple proposal: to not increase rents again, given the rises in the past few years.

We pointed out the comparison with other universities, and noted the past rises. We attempted to negotiate, and did offer some ways in which the savings could be made to make such a plan feasible. Sadly, the University didn’t listen to our pleas, and so intends to raise rents by an average of 2.1% between this year and next year. They did offer the small recompense of “looking into” tailoring the raises to make sure that the cheaper accommodation can stay relatively cheap, but we haven’t heard any further on this.

Sorry this isn’t better news – we did try! Thank you to anyone who submitted feedback – our case would have been really hard to make without it.

Sami Wannell (Welfare Officer)
Andy Perkins (Governance and Finance Officer)
Andrew Bradley (President)