Someone has to make housing a condition of recruiting students

I’m not necessarily overflowing with sympathy. The piece says that she’d originally planned to go to Leeds University, where she had a confirmed place, but switched to the University of Exeter in August via a trade-up.

The city’s student accommodation, it seems, is full. Carlos from Spain, whose son got in through clearing, can only find rooms in Exmouth. The horrors!

Anna, the mother of an incoming student from Bury St Edmunds, told the paper that the university waited four days to alert her daughter that there might be a problem securing accommodation, and by then all her clearing options were long gone:

To me, it feels like a total stitch-up and a cynical ploy by the university to trap people for next year ahead of the game.

Sarah from Chelmsford had planned to attend Cambridge University but failed to meet the grades, was swiftly accepted into Exeter, but then realised there was an issue:

We can’t be alone in this situation, and they shouldn’t be allowed to offer a place if they can’t provide accommodation.

Meanwhile there may or may not be a problem in Bristol.

Call Shelter

The Telegraph’s splash on Wednesday was that Bristol SU had told first years to ring a homelessness charity because halls were full.

What actually happened is that a student with no room a fortnight before Welcome Week emailed the union’s housing advice service, and got back links to the SU’s own lettings agency, some local agents, and Shelter’s emergency housing line.

That’s what a competent housing adviser does when someone might have nowhere to sleep. Whether Bristol has actually run out of rooms is less clear.

Its guarantee is broader than most – it covers clearing and insurance students who accept by 31 August, with 48 hours to book once the invitation comes – and its statement is that only a “small number” of late applicants fall outside it.

But the forums tell a different kind of story. It is claimed that the booking system fell over during those 48-hour windows, students who’d given a budget were allocated rooms thousands of pounds above it or in another university’s blocks, a disabled student with care needs was offered a £10,500 room and told to go private if she wanted an accessible one, and the guarantee’s small print says the room “may not be in one of our advertised residences”.

That’s a fairness and affordability problem rather than a no-rooms problem, and it’s landing on the students – contextual offer, disabled, late in the cycle – that any university’s APP would say it prioritises.

Into all this wandered a shadow education minister, Saqib Bhatti, who told the Telegraph it was “damning” and blamed the desire to send everyone to university, overstretched courses, and graduates leaving with crippling debt and poor job prospects.

Whatever you think of that argument in general, it is an odd one to aim at Bristol and Exeter. Any growth at the top of the tariff table outrunning beds is a direct consequence of removing number controls, and every subsequent Conservative proposal to squeeze “low quality” provision would have pushed more demand up the tables.

You can’t fix a housing shortage in Clifton by closing a foundation year in Wolverhampton, Saqib.

A logic game

A couple of years ago now I proposed a little logic game for anyone with responsibility over recruitment.

Before you press “send” on an offer to a student who’ll be living away from home, work out which is true:

a) you’re confident they’ll find somewhere reasonably affordable, safe and near to the university to live,

b) you have good reason to be not at all confident, or

c) you haven’t got a scooby?

And if it’s b) or c), do you make that 1) abundantly clear, 2) stay vague, or 3) imply availability that isn’t there?

I suspect we still have plenty of universities in Category B2. The word that does the work in every university press statement is “demand” – deployed as though applicants arrive unbidden like weather.

Every part of that demand is engineered – offer rates, grade conditions, contextual offers, the clearing hotline, the September conversion emails. A university that wanted 500 fewer first years could have had 500 fewer first years. And a guarantee whose deadline falls a fortnight before A level results day, so that insurance and clearing entrants can never be inside it, is scoped to be met regardless of how many people are recruited. It isn’t a promise about housing. It’s a promise about the promise.

Nor is it new. A whole clutch of higher tariff institutions paid students to defer in 2021 when grade inflation overfilled them, and every year we seem to get stories of universities sending students to other cities.

Over and over

Some of those cities need them. Nottingham City Council’s March report counts 3,541 empty purpose-built beds, with vacancies up from under one per cent three years ago to 12.7 per cent, and 16 per cent in studios.

Unite’s interim results in July announced it is selling up to 20,000 beds and leaving nine of its 29 cities, because the portfolio it’s exiting runs at 86 per cent occupancy while the cities it’s keeping have 2.3 applicants for every place.

The same results note that universities renewed fewer nomination agreements this year because they were reluctant to guarantee beds for first years who hadn’t yet confirmed – whatever they’ve put in their OfS financial sustainability return, some are underwriting fewer beds because they can’t predict their intake.

Nottingham’s not alone. Durham’s own figures showed an 800-bed surplus across the city last year, and a councillor asked in June why applications for more keep being approved when “we can no longer give any evidence that there is any quantitative need” – the planning officer’s answer was that developers are targeting international students.

Coventry’s planners conceded city centre oversupply in April, the civic society describes a scheme of over a thousand units that has never been more than two-thirds full, and in July the council refused an application to let two floors of a student block to non-students.

StuRents’ occupancy survey, which now covers about half the private market, had bookings for this year running behind last year’s for the second cycle in a row, with the best of its 28 locations at 65 per cent booked by March and the worst at 24.

Surplus might sound in the student interest, but notsomuch. The empty rooms are studios and premium en-suites priced for international postgraduates who stopped coming after the dependants ban, and Cushman and Wakefield’s 2025 report has 17 per cent of all beds, and a quarter of private ones, now priced above the maximum maintenance loan, against under four per cent a decade ago – with rents in the cheapest stock still rising fastest.

A city can have thousands of empty beds and no affordable ones at the same time, which is why Sheffield SU’s housing page tells students there is a surplus and that rents keep going up anyway.

The surplus is also in the wrong place. Knight Frank counts 50,000 beds under construction nationally, and after London the largest pipelines are in Bristol at 5,000 and Coventry at 3,600 – a city now refusing conversions of blocks it can’t fill.

Purpose-built student blocks don’t convert easily into family homes, because they were designed too small. Nottingham and Coventry are both now writing planning rules that cap studios and require new schemes to be convertible to general housing, and Nottingham’s report calls its own version shutting the stable door.

The market is now running in reverse. Unite says development outside London needs rents above £300 a week to be viable against a regional average of £190, so new supply will slow sharply for two or three years just as the 18-year-old population peaks.

So the country has too many premium studios in the wrong cities and too few affordable rooms in the right ones, produced by the same set of incentives. Investors chase structural undersupply, councils count beds towards housing targets, universities forecast growth to planning inspectors and demand to nobody, and when a market tips in either direction there is no reverse gear. The empty block and the student calling Shelter are the same failure with opposite symptoms.

Everyone has already said it

Back in May 2023, Universities UK published guidance for senior leaders that asked whether their housing guarantee was fair, transparent, and achievable, whether it prioritised the students most in need, whether the institution has an agreed position on being the housing provider of last resort, and whether estates sat on the student number planning group with live occupancy data during clearing. Its case studies describe forecasting shortfalls in advance and letting the bed count inform the recruitment limit. Is it being followed?

OfS has Risk 11 in its Equality of Opportunity Risk Register, which says that where accommodation is limited, students with less money or who are accepted late in the cycle may not be able to secure suitable housing. A quick look at the approved access and participation plans of the universities in the tightest housing markets outside London barely mention the risk, or answer it with a hardship fund.

The Department for Education’s post-16 white paper last October promised a statement of expectations calling on providers to work with local authorities to ensure adequate accommodation “for the individuals they recruit” – a form of words that already rejects the guarantee-was-met defence, because it ties the obligation to the recruitment decision rather than to whatever cut-off the accommodation office chose. Eleven months on the statement hasn’t appeared.

In February a minister told Parliament that the department “has no remit to intervene” in student accommodation, and this week the only politician with a quote in the story was from the opposition.

And the Competition and Markets Authority has said since 2015 that information about accommodation is material to a student’s decision, a position now hardened by fining powers under the DMCC Act and about to be turned into an OfS condition of registration through C6. On the forums where students are trading tips about Airbnbs and Facebook house shares, nobody mentions any of it.

Someone has to make it a condition

There’s a wider set of questions about whether the rapid growth or rapid contraction of universities is in the interests of the towns and cities they inhabit, and where it isn’t, whether it’s reasonable to crack on anyway in the interests of students “trading up”.

There’s another set of questions about the eventual impact on lower-tariff universities when higher-tariff ones expand, and whether the interests of someone scraping into the Russell Group with a B on results day are more important than the interests of the student who can only afford to commute locally whose course has now closed.

There’s also a set of questions about the way in which “demand” is framed, how the selling of universities works, and where students with the spoils of the great boomer wealth transfer will be spending their money and investing and housing and businesses over the next decade.

You can argue that MHCLG, the Home Office, the DfT, strategic authorities, metro mayors, DHSC and DCMS should be interested in, have some responsibility for and be able to exert some influence over the geography of student numbers distribution under a Burnham government interested in place.

There’s less debate over whether universities need a consequence. The CMA, UUK and OfS have each written down, each in their own half-arsed way, that a university shouldn’t recruit away-from-home students their town or city can’t house. I suspect that DfE’s statement of expectations, when it comes, will “urge” and “encourage”, and will be just as useless as the other three-letter bodies have repeatedly been.

This really isn’t hard. A condition of registration that requires a provider to publish the numbers it has told the council, the numbers it has told the regulator, and the numbers it has told applicants – and requires them to be able to demonstrate with reasonable confidence that their admitted students will find somewhere to live that’s reasonably affordable, reasonably safe and reasonably near to the university.

Without that, the only people with a strike mandate over stretched capacity are staff. Ironic, given it may well be that expansion beyond a city’s housing footprint is what enables redundancies to be called off.