How SUs actually won microwaves on campus – and why “health and safety” is a category, not a reason

There is a line in a piece we ran last year from the officer of a very small SU that could easily be manifesto for the whole sector:

we have at least one shared enemy with all unions. Please let students have a microwave.

When we coded hundreds of officer manifestos this summer, a working microwave turned up with the same weight as a module handbook, and it turns up every spring because a 2026 cohort that commutes, works, and can’t afford £7 for a panini keeps asking for the same thing – and keeps being told no.

The “no” usually arrives wearing a hi-vis jacket. Health and safety, fire risk, hygiene, allergens, the cleaning contract, the catering contract, the library “isn’t a kitchen” – and the officer who ran on it spends a year discovering that nobody can quite say which of those is the actual objection or who has the power to waive it.

So we have pulled lots of cases – SU wins, university refusals, estates documents, committee minutes, and what we have seen on study tours – to work out what universities are really worried about, and what the SUs that got their microwaves did differently.

What universities actually object to

One useful document we found is a 2016 student newspaper story from Newcastle, because it tells us about a library saying the quiet bit out loud.

Union president Jack Taylor had made microwaves in the Robinson Library café his headline manifesto pledge, and library staff replied on the public “tell us what you think” board that a microwave had been in the café some years earlier and was removed because of “problems it caused with cleanliness and hygiene”, that they had “recently contacted a couple of other university libraries where they have installed microwaves, and apparently it has been fairly disastrous”, and then this.

I don’t like to give negative responses, but in this case I think we need to take a clear view about what the library is actually here for… Not to maintain a domestic kitchen and food preparation facility… We don’t think it’s a service we can reasonably be expected to provide.

Taylor’s own summary of what he was up against was “food hygiene issues and the task of finding someone to service and clean the machines”.

Notice what is missing. Fire barely features, and neither does electrical safety – the objection is that a microwave is an open-ended cleaning and servicing liability with no budget line and no owner, dropped on a service that does not think feeding people is its job. That library café now lists “a microwave for heating your own food” alongside its hot and cold water taps, so the objection was overcome in the end, and every other case we found is similar.

At Robert Gordon in 2016 the union won three microwaves through the student partnership agreement, only to find the one in the Sir Ian Wood Building was available after 7pm because the project had been scoped as “out of hours food provision” – and when officers pushed for lunchtime access, the objection that surfaced at executive level was catering revenue.

At Anglia Ruskin students had been told through staff-student liaison committees that microwaves in London “would never be possible” on health and safety grounds, while the SU had been running them in its own Cambridge and Chelmsford spaces since 2018.

At Perth College the microwaves were nearly removed in 2020 not because of any incident but because the student association’s cleaning rota fell over when officers couldn’t get to campus and Sodexo had no spare staff.

In a Student Room thread a mature student at a small provider, told microwaves were “a health and safety issue” with a risk assessment “not available for students”, put in a freedom of information request for it – while a staff member at a Russell Group university replied that they provide microwaves in multiple common areas and “we’re not exactly mickey mouse when it comes to health and safety”.

Another poster relayed the allergen cross-contamination line. Manchester restricted hot food to the AGLC café in 2019 because four in five surveyed students objected to “smelly food” in study spaces, and Trinity College Dublin removed a microwave the union had installed itself in the Arts Block within a fortnight.

Line those up and the real objections are:

Smell in study space
Who cleans it and who pays when it breaks,
Whether it undercuts a catering contract that has been told to make a surplus,
The absence of anyone with authority to say yes,
A genuine but manageable fire and hygiene risk that a domestic appliance carries anywhere.

The SUs that won treated those as five separate problems with five separate answers.

Location does most of the work

Coventry is a good recent example. The full-time officers launched an open letter on 17 November 2025 and had 1,153 signatures inside 15 working days, and by 19 January 2026 the university had agreed a pilot.

The university’s stated requirements were “appropriate power supply, ventilation, taps, sinks, and hygiene facilities”, so the SU proposed Jaguar Building G30A, a room that “previously operated as a café and already meets the necessary infrastructure and safety standards”, open 8am to 10pm.

Almost the entire estates argument evaporated because the room already had extraction, a sink, hard floors, and a cleaning regime.

Portsmouth’s library did the same with smell. Its October 2024 “hot food trial” put microwaves in the ground floor café area and confined hot food to it “so food smells don’t get trapped in other study spaces”, and by December staff were reporting “great feedback” and extending provision through the holidays when the library stays open.

Manchester, having banned hot food from the reading rooms, built a dedicated Library Lounge at the Main Library in September 2022 with microwaves, free hot water, and charging points, and the same year’s cost of living package negotiated with the SU promised “cosy campus” spaces “equipped with free to use microwaves, hot water, and washing up facilities” and “bring and ping” spaces for food from home. Kent has campus lounges across its colleges with “microwaves and hot water taps” from 8am to 6pm.

Queen Mary’s libraries still refuse hot food entirely, but the SU hub behind Ground café has one.

Glasgow Caledonian, Plymouth, City St George’s, and Leeds Beckett all put theirs in SU-controlled or student-support space, where the SU owns the risk assessment and the cleaning rather than asking a library to.

The pattern is that microwaves go where there is already a sink, a bin regime, a staffed desk, and some separation from silent study – café back of house, SU buildings, support hubs, commuter lounges – and not on a study floor with optical smoke detection and a cleaning contract that stops at the door.

The Swedish version we saw on a study tour, where a paid-for restaurant sits next door to a room full of microwaves maintained by catering staff so students who brought food sit with those who bought it, is the same idea with the maintenance question answered by the building.

Linköping’s SU building has over 100 of them, and its engineering union LinTek writes “enough microwave ovens to heat the lunch food” into its constitutional values.

Ask for a pilot with the marking scheme

Coventry’s pilot is explicitly conditional – the university monitors “student usage and demand”, “operational and maintenance requirements”, and “health, safety, and cleaning processes” before deciding on a rollout across the group, and the SU told students “use it or we lose it”.

Portsmouth called its scheme a trial and gave it a feedback address. Anglia Ruskin’s 2019 report recommended a six-month trial with at least two microwaves at each of Farringdon and East India, with signage and cleaning materials. Manchester framed even its hot food restriction as a trial.

A time-limited pilot with agreed success measures does two things for an estates director. It converts “no” into “not yet, show us”, and it lets them say yes to something small and reversible rather than to a permanent service the library “can’t reasonably be expected to provide”.

It also protects the SU, because a pilot that records usage counts, queue lengths, cleaning completion, faults, and incidents produces the evidence for the next building – Thompson Rivers in Canada got a university space committee to commit to expansion in 2024 by auditing existing sites and showing six of eight had restricted access and some were dirty or broken, and Healthy Trinity’s January 2026 audit found 28 microwaves across ten locations with queues of up to 35 minutes in the Arts Building, which is how a favour becomes a line in a food strategy with an annual audit attached.

Cleaning is a service, not a sign

This is where the Newcastle objection bites and where most SU wins are weakest. Every successful installation has a sign – UCA’s says “please ensure you keep them clean to allow others to enjoy them too”, Portsmouth supplies cleaning materials and asks users to tell staff when they run out, and one we photographed in Portugal just said “clean them after please”.

Glasgow Caledonian’s published rules are the fullest and worth copying wholesale, because they read like a risk assessment’s control measures rendered as signage – “you are using these microwaves at your own risk, microwaves can be a fire risk”, never leave unattended, clean before and after, microwave-safe containers only, no metal or foil, don’t run empty, follow the packaging, pierce the film, report smoke or sparks to reception or security, with a link to the manufacturer’s manual.

But a sign is not an operating model, and the estates documents in our pile are unusually candid about that. Reading’s cleaning service level agreement covers tea point areas but assigns “maintenance of microwave, fridge and other appliance cleanliness” to the users, and excludes washing up.

The former University of Bolton’s facilities page says its maintenance team does not repair microwaves, fridges, or kettles, which “remain the asset owner’s responsibility”. Perth College’s committee minutes show a student-run rota collapsing the moment officers were off campus. Against that, Tilburg in the Netherlands states that campus microwaves are “cleaned daily”, North East Scotland College stocks its student kitchens with cleaning supplies and has staff maintain the rooms daily, and the fire risk assessment for Oxford’s Andrew Wiles Building records kitchenette microwaves “cleaned daily” by the cleaners, who raise any issues – alongside one microwave smoke incident and no fire since the building opened.

So the ask has to distinguish users wiping spills from a scheduled clean and inspection that somebody is paid to do, with named cover for absence, a fault-reporting route, and an agreed answer to who removes a broken unit and who buys the replacement.

We’ve been making this point for years – the old story of sabbs pleased to have secured 31 microwaves, and “what happens if one of the microwaves breaks?”, and the registrar buying 30 microwaves “but never intending to replace broken ones” as the textbook example of compliance rather than commitment. Carleton’s SU in Canada budgeted around C$6,000 for 12 microwaves in 2017 and its president said the cleaning and upkeep were extra – present the service cost, not the Argos price.

The safety questions have boring answers

Since fire and hygiene will be raised whether or not they are the real objection, it helps to arrive with the answers. The realistic incident is not a fire but smoke and an alarm – Queen Mary’s health and safety team’s “lessons learnt” note describes a meal left unattended in foil packaging in a staff kitchen that sparked and filled the room, and a decade of Nottingham security logs in Wonkhe’s True Crime on Campus series has microwave entries that are all bread left in too long, food cooked too long, and, once, a microwave placed on a lit hob – all in halls, all user error, all cleared by security.

The controls are the ones on GCU’s sign. Electrical compliance is cheaper than estates fears – Essex’s portable appliance testing procedure puts appliances in communal kitchens on a three-year formal test cycle with user visual checks between, and Dundee’s electricity policy notes that microwave leakage testing is a separate thing from PAT, so don’t let the two get conflated into a maintenance contract.

Aberystwyth publishes a two-page microwave risk assessment template rating residual risks low or very low after controls, which is useful for showing the shape of the thing even if the local competent person needs to redo it for the actual room. Edinburgh’s fire guidance confines microwaves to kitchens and designated food preparation spaces, which is a location argument, not a ban.

Allergens are answered by design rather than debate – Middlesex installed “specific microwaves for certain dietary requirements” in 2018 with an honest note that “this is not monitored”, and the ventilation and water requirements in a university design guide like Oxford’s attach to commercial kitchens, not to a domestic unit on a worktop in an existing café zone.

The commercial objection is contractual, so ask for the clause

Robert Gordon’s executive worried about catering income, and Cardiff’s college forum minutes record microwaves, hot water, and vending banks being bundled into a catering tender. There is a reason.

A CUBO survey found 67 per cent of institutions give catering a remit to make a surplus, benchmarking material treats gross margins around 60 per cent as a normal comparator, and average catering income runs at £4.77m per institution, while 31 per cent say catering is subsidised – so whether feeding students is a service or a revenue stream is a choice each university has made.

In the United States, Temple’s Aramark contract explicitly blocked a student food initiative. The Robert Gordon answer was the right one – students already bring food from home, so permit access and measure the actual commercial impact – but the underlying move is to ask which contract clause is engaged and to get microwaves, hot water, and social eating space into the next catering procurement and the next building brief rather than negotiating around them afterwards.

Ownership is the principle, not the furniture

When a LinkedIn thread about student kitchenettes at Lund drew UK academics pointing proudly to their commuter lounges, they had spotted the provision and missed the principle – at Lund the departmental student association owns each space, sets the rules, and organises the cleaning rota, whereas “the UK version is a professionally managed room with a microwave. Same furniture, opposite signal.”

Helga’s bookable kitchen at Haaga-Helia in Finland makes the person who books responsible for its condition, and on the Baltic tour we saw “very little risk assessment mentality” because institutions let students crack on. Trinity’s guerrilla microwave failed because it had ownership without infrastructure, and Perth’s nearly failed because it had infrastructure without ownership.

The projects that last – Queen Mary’s Hive East refurbishment handed to the SU to operate, Edinburgh’s Heat and Eat kitchens replicated from King’s Buildings to Potterrow to 40 George Square with a named building manager – settle who owns the room at the same time as the works.

So what?

The SUs that got their microwaves stopped asking estates to “provide microwaves” and brought a scoped project. That means evidencing demand at scale through an open letter, an ideas platform, or a general meeting motion, and mapping existing provision the way Manchester, UCL, Southampton, and Thompson Rivers did, counting working, accessible units rather than appliances.

It means naming a room that already has a sink, extraction, hard floors, and a desk nearby, or that the SU controls, and proposing two or three domestic units rather than a kitchen. It means specifying the hours up front, because Robert Gordon shows a microwave that opens at 7pm is not a lunch facility.

It means a laminated set of rules that reads like control measures, cleaning kit on the wall, and a separate, funded daily clean with named cover, a fault route, and a replacement budget, with the asset owner agreed before purchase. It means a one-term or six-month pilot with usage, queues, cleaning logs, faults, and incidents recorded and a review date at which somebody with authority decides.

And it means asking, whenever the answer is no, which hazard, which policy, which contract clause, and which person – because “health and safety” is a category, not a reason.

Then it means turning the win into a right. A third of universities already install microwaves, fridges, and hot water taps for students, Manchester and Edinburgh have had heat and eat stations since 2022, and the class of 2026 will run on it again next spring regardless.

The difference between seven microwaves bought with the registrar’s year-end underspend and “a permanent right to have your food warmed up on campus, ensconced in a healthy eating policy” is whether the SU wrote it into a commuter student policy, a food strategy with an annual audit, the catering tender, and the brief for the next building.

Listen for the experience underneath the demand, fix that, and the manifesto point stops coming back.

And there’s more

Eighteen further examples of universities and colleges providing microwaves for students – Glasgow, Essex and Birmingham are particularly useful for the estates and safety arguments.

University of Glasgow – a documented estates project. The Boyd Orr Eco-Hub included a kitchen fit-out, additional power, ventilation and a repurposed microwave. The page names the project team and gives construction dates and the £107,233 total refurbishment cost.

University of Essex – provision plus an approval procedure. Its student food and drink directory confirms microwaves in SU spaces, departmental common rooms and other social spaces. Particularly useful is its electrical safety page, which describes approval for microwaves in offices, staff common rooms and kitchenettes. Estates checks circuit capacity, and a nominated employee takes responsibility for testing, cleaning and safe positioning – see “Electrical equipment permitted in non-residential areas”.

University of Birmingham – responding to cleaning concerns. Following library survey feedback about a dirty microwave, the university arranged weekly cleaning and provided wipes. It also reports discussions with Estates and Campus Services about built-in microwaves and a hot and cold water tap, with those improvements described as work underway.

Abertay University – included in an SU refurbishment. A 2025 announcement confirms a microwave in the renovated Students’ Association kitchen area, alongside improvements to the entrance, lift and toilets.

Nottingham Trent University – a campus-wide directory. Its self-catering stations page lists microwave locations across the City, Clifton, Brackenhurst and Mansfield campuses.

University of Strathclyde – integrated into a major building refurbishment. The Learning and Teaching Building guide lists microwave facilities on Level 3 and a self-catering kitchen on Level 1.

Royal Holloway – lounges designed with students. Its commuter guidance describes student lounges with refreshment stations containing a microwave, fridge and hot water tap, plus microwaves in the SU lounge.

Lancaster University – an off-campus students’ kitchen. Furness College’s kitchen provides a microwave, fridges, cooking facilities and seating, with access advertised for all Furness students and staff.

University of Sussex – numerous named locations. Its study space directory identifies microwaves in academic buildings, SU spaces, the library cafés and the Student Centre’s “Heat and Eat” area.

University of Nottingham – free campus kitchens. Its cost of living guidance lists spaces offering microwaves, toasters and hot water, including the Portland Building’s Oasis.

University of Leicester – commuter provision. Its living at home FAQs explicitly confirm that students can bring lunch and use microwaves on campus.

Kingston University – a sustainability rationale. Its sustainable food page explains that microwaves across campus enable students and staff to reheat leftovers, helping to reduce food waste.

Swansea University – a shared study space kitchen facility. Engineering Central’s “Base”, room A006, has a microwave, water boiler and seating, and is advertised as open daily from 8am to 9pm without booking.

Queen Margaret University – microwaves within the food court. Its cost of living guidance invites students to heat food brought from home using microwaves in the 1875 food court.

University of Stirling – commuter support. A September 2025 university article directs students to a microwave beside Scran for reheating meals.

Lincoln Bishop University – SU microwaves. Its commuter guidance explicitly advertises microwaves in the students’ union for heating meals.

University of Dundee – library provision. Adding a practical example to the earlier safety material, its commuter guidance confirms microwaves, sinks and hot water taps in the Main Library.

Lincoln College – a further college example. Its campuses page lists microwaves and a fridge in the Student Common Room, alongside free tea, coffee and drinking water.

Coventry SU – “We Now Have Microwaves”, update on the microwaves campaign and pilot conditions

The Tab Newcastle, 2016 – “Union President’s promise to put microwaves in the library could be toast”, with the library’s response in full

RGU Union – “MicrowaveGate”, on installation, access hours, and catering revenue

ARU Students’ Union – London Speak Week 2019 report, page 5, on repeated safety refusals and the proposed trial

Perth College UHI audit committee papers, December 2020, on the student microwave cleaning rota

GCU Students’ Association – student microwaves and hot water boiler rules

University of Portsmouth Library – hot food trial and the new microwaves and vending machines

University of Manchester – Library Lounge and 2019 hot food guidance for the Main Library and AGLC

Healthy Trinity – microwave audit report, January 2026

TRUSU – securing a university committee commitment on microwaves after an access audit

University of Reading – estates cleaning services service level agreement, kitchen and tea point specification

Oxford Mathematical Institute – Andrew Wiles Building fire risk assessment, pages 10 to 11