One purpose-built student accommodation room in seven is sitting empty, and students still can’t afford to live.
StuRents recorded private PBSA occupancy at 85.4 per cent for 2025-26, down 5.4 points year on year against a pre-Covid budgeting assumption of 95 to 98 per cent, with cashback offers now exceeding £1,000 a let.
Empty rooms and unaffordable rents at the same time isn’t a contradiction. It’s what a market looks like when the product on offer has been financed past the people it was built for.
I’ve written before about shipping containers and digs drives as a solution. But what if there’s one that addresses a problem at the other end of the age spectrum?
Zoom out and the same pattern holds across the whole stock. The Resolution Foundation’s analysis of the Family Resources Survey puts England at around 67 million bedrooms against roughly 38 million that would be needed if every household were housed exactly to the bedroom standard, with the total occupied rising from 53 million in 1994-95 to 66 million in 2022-23 and 71 per cent of households now living somewhere with a spare room.
The English Housing Survey uses a stricter two-or-more test and still finds 9.8 million under-occupied households, 40 per cent of the total, of which 8.7 million are owner occupiers against 743,000 private renters and 391,000 social renters. Owner occupier under-occupation climbed from 50 per cent to 55 per cent between 2012-13 and 2022-23. Among renters, no movement at all.
The age gradient is the steepest in the data. Census 2021 recorded 84.1 per cent of households under-occupied where the head was over 65, against 53.3 per cent where the head was 25 to 34, rising to 89.7 per cent among those owning outright.
The Resolution Foundation has single pensioners posting the largest rise of any group over three decades, from 67 per cent in 1994-95 to 74 per cent in 2022-23.
So the country has a surplus of roughly 29 million bedrooms in England alone, concentrated in the tenure and age band furthest from the people who need them, while students in Bristol and Leeds and London do four-hour round trips or stay at their parents’ because the alternative costs more than they’re lent.
The bill in the birth rate
What makes this more than a distributional curiosity is where the costs of the mismatch surface.
The provisional total fertility rate for England and Wales was 1.39 in 2025 on 585,396 births, the lowest since 1977, with Scotland at 1.25. The OBR has the old-age dependency ratio rising from around 31 per cent in 2024 to over 47 per cent by 2074, and state pension spending going from 5 per cent to around 9 per cent of GDP on its baseline.
The housing link isn’t rhetorical. Research from Bristol on England and Wales splits the effect of house price rises by tenure and finds them running in opposite directions – a 10 per cent rise lifted owners’ fertility by 2.4 per cent within a year and washed out within two, which is timing rather than family size, while for renters there was no effect in year one, fertility 2 to 4 per cent lower at two years, and still depressed at three.
That second pattern looks like an effect on completed fertility, and it’s the pattern that now applies to a far larger share of people at prime childbearing age than it did a generation ago.
ONS has 7.2 million young adults aged 15 to 34 living with parents in 2025, up from 6.6 million in 2015, with 28.7 per cent of 20 to 34 year olds among them. Average household size is 2.36 and 8.6 million people live alone, up from 7.7 million a decade earlier.
Household formation is being suppressed at one end of the age range and dissolved at the other, and the bedroom surplus is what that looks like on a spreadsheet.
The blocker
A Pegasus survey of over-55s found only 14 per cent planning to downsize and 50 per cent planning to stay, rising to 68 per cent among 71 to 75 year olds – but the two barriers people actually named were the hassle of moving at 37 per cent and stamp duty at 35 per cent.
Homes for Later Living polling puts a quarter of over-65s as wanting to downsize and put off by lack of suitable properties and the cost and stress of moving, which scales to around 3.1 million people. A quarter of the group being blamed for hoarding rooms are trying to leave them.
They have almost nowhere to go. Around 2.5 per cent of the UK’s 29 million dwellings count as retirement housing, and the stock is itself skewed towards three-plus bedroom houses.
The International Longevity Centre found roughly 1 per cent of the UK’s over-60s had moved into retirement properties, against 17 per cent in the United States and 13 per cent in Australia and New Zealand. Those who do move often find the resale market close to non-existent, which turns a downsize into a financial dead end.
The financial mechanics are worse than the housing ones. Dutch mortgage advisers have set these out more clearly than anyone here – downsizers often need a large bridging loan, many don’t qualify on pension income alone while their equity is still tied up in the current home, and two older people choosing to share a home can see their benefits reduced for the privilege.
And the cost of leaving it alone compounds. The Second Pensions Commission projects homeownership among the over-65s falling from just under 80 per cent to below 70 per cent by 2050, pushing the pension-age Housing Benefit caseload from 1.1 million in 2030-31 to 1.7 million by 2050-51.
Today’s priced-out renters become tomorrow’s renting pensioners, and that bill comes along before any missing births would have.
Basically, both of them need to live in halls
So students want somewhere clustered near a campus, serviced, with a communal space, somebody on site when something goes wrong, and a tenancy that matches an academic year rather than a life stage.
Older people trying to leave a four-bedroom house want somewhere clustered, single-storey, serviced, with a communal space, somebody on site when something goes wrong, and neighbours.
The Dutch have even written the spec down – their definition of a geclusterde woonvorm is a minimum of twelve zero-step homes sharing a communal space and forming a community, which is a hall of residence with a lift in it.
So what if they did it together?
That’s what the Dutch scheme does, placing students into senior housing complexes rather than individual homes, which also disposes of the awkwardness of a stranger in the spare room.
Connect Generations charges €781.50 in the first year and €723.50 thereafter plus €50 to €80 a month for utilities, in exchange for 20 hours of activities a month – baking, bingo, shopping, fixing computers, walking a dog, Rummikub.
Omroep West followed a student living in around 25 square metres for what works out at roughly €100 a month, and the organisation screens applicants, runs evaluation conversations at one, three and six months, and logs hours through an app.
The home-based versions have been running longer and have an even better evidence base. Spain’s Vive y Convive runs on agreements between city governments and universities placing students from out of town in older people’s homes, and Madrid’s own evaluation is strong evidence that the model delivers.
After a year, 72 per cent of older participants felt safer and 82 per cent felt less lonely, 95 per cent said their expectations had been met and 92 per cent would recommend it.
The stated motivations were night-time company at 77 per cent and loneliness at 56 per cent – which is to say the scheme was solving the problem people actually had.
Germany has the cleanest design. Wohnen für Hilfe, run through the Studierendenwerke, works on one hour of help per month per square metre of room – 15 hours a month for a 15 square metre room – with the student paying utilities only, care services explicitly excluded, and brokerage free at the point of use.
Konstanz publishes the exchange rate so both sides can see it, at roughly €10 of rent per hour given. Cologne runs the national hub jointly between the city housing office and the university, and Karlsruhe extends the same model into shared flats with disability organisations.
France did something that makes all of it durable. Cohabilis explains that fourteen years of operating without a framework left schemes exposed to requalification as an employment contract, as a residential tenancy, or as unlicensed estate agency – so article 117 of the ELAN law of 23 November 2018 settled all three.
Ensemble2générations sets out the result – the 1989 tenancy statute is disapplied, a charter set by ministerial order in January 2020 defines the framework, a senior who rents must notify their landlord who cannot object, and the young person pays a modest contribution taxable to the senior.
Back in the UK
The closest we have in the UK is Homeshare,, and the standard offer is around ten hours of support a week with no personal care. That’s 520 hours a year, roughly three times the German commitment. And the homesharer pays as well – Novus advertised £199.34 a month plus a £100 matching fee and Two Generations quotes around £350 a month.
Value those 520 hours at the April 2025 National Living Wage of £12.21, the rate ONS uses as a benchmark in its own affordability work, and you get £6,349 of labour on top of £4,200 in cash at the Two Generations rate. Total contribution £10,549, against £7,566 for a purpose-built room with no caring responsibility attached. The labour valuation is contestable – companionship isn’t shift work, and homesharers will tell you the relationship is the point rather than the price. The direction isn’t.
The reason isn’t British meanness. It’s that in Germany the matching, screening and monitoring is carried by the Studierendenwerke, in Spain by municipalities and universities, and in the Netherlands by care organisations and housing associations.
There’s no carrier here, so the cost of running the service falls on the two people in the match, who are by construction the two people least able to pay it.
So the things a functioning version needs are already visible. A statutory framework that disapplies tenancy law and settles the employment question, which France has. An institutional carrier that absorbs the matching cost so neither party pays it, which Germany has. Hours capped by floor area rather than by whatever the householder fancies, which Germany also has.
None of this needs a single planning application, a new tower, or a decade. It requires a department to work out that when the country is short of somewhere for students to live and short of somewhere for older people to move to, it’s building two sets of halls when it could be building one.
Given that students belong to DfE, housing to MHCLG, older people’s care to DHSC and the tax treatment of the whole thing to the Treasury, the question is which of the four picks up the phone first.
