Complaints to the OIA about accommodation have been climbing fast – from 13 in 2022 to 55 in 2023 and 108 in 2025, with 95 already in by the end of October this year.
Accommodation is still a small slice of the ombuds’ caseload, but it reads the rise as growing frustration, and it has now published a casework note setting out six “insights” for providers that own or manage halls, alongside seven new case summaries.
The six are that providers should listen carefully at the earliest stage, be clear about expectations and outcomes, remember that frontline responses matter, make routes and deadlines for raising issues clear, keep good records, and make contractual arrangements clear.
The money is going up too – the compensation and settlement sums the OIA recommends have more than doubled over five years.
Independent Adjudicator Helen Megarry says students often turn down a provider’s offer when they feel it hasn’t recognised what the original problem did to their wellbeing, even where the provider has already accepted that something went wrong.
The summaries are a cavalcade of the ways halls can go wrong. A postgraduate found damp, a bad smell and broken items in their room, never moved in, and was told they were liable for the year because the room wasn’t “uninhabitable”.
The provider eventually conceded that it had never explained the difference between an inventory report and a maintenance request, or that a different room was an option, and let the student off two terms.
Another student endured a months-long pest infestation, sat through a staff member suggesting that international students might be bringing the pests in, and then waited more than ten months for a final response to their complaint – with the OIA deciding that an eventual offer of £2,600 was reasonable.
A valuable item was damaged when security cleared the room of a student on a leave of absence, having been told to film the clearance and not having done so. An admissions team told a student its decision on a tariff-linked rent discount was final and pointed them straight at the OIA.
And a provider offered eight students £50 each for a multi car pile-up of Wi-Fi, leak, hot water and inventory problems, before settling at £300 once the OIA pointed out that it had only counted the financial impact.
Most providers that own halls are members of the UUK/GuildHE Accommodation Code of Practice, a scheme that gets them out of HMO licensing in return for a set of standards, an annual return on complaints and an independent audit every three years.
Neither the news release nor any of the summaries mentions it, and the casework note does so only once – signposting students with complaints about private landlords to it, when the Code is only open to educational establishments that manage or control the building.
Much of the “insight” is already in it. Paragraph 97 requires managers in a dispute to confirm what they’ll do and by when, explain anything they can’t or won’t do and why, and record settlements and closures, while paragraph 119 wants staff trained to know where their responsibilities begin and end.
Paragraphs 78 and 79 require an inventory before occupation and a clearly communicated way of reporting anything that differs from it. Paragraph 77 sets the bar at “no material defects” rather than habitability, and paragraph 31 requires a reasonable alternative “without delay” if a resident can’t use their room – which between them cover almost everything that went wrong in the damp room case.
There’s a pest management duty with anticipated response times at paragraph 184, a requirement to record what staff remove from a room at paragraph 93, and an obligation at paragraph 53 to set out any discounts, and the terms they come on, before a student signs.
And at paragraph 34, members must update the Code’s administrators every month on any complaint not resolved within three months. If the pest case was in a Code building, that ten-month complaint should have generated around seven updates, which raises the question of what anyone did with them.
The Code also says its administrators “liaise regularly” with the OIA, and expects members to involve their SU in complaints and audits – neither of which you’d know from the new material.
The cases expose where the Code is thin, too. Its only compensation rules, for late buildings, are about reimbursing out-of-pocket costs, with nothing on distress and inconvenience – the gap the OIA says drives students to reject offers.
It sets no standard on releasing students from contracts or on replacement tenants, which is the sixth insight, and has nothing on clearing a room once a licence has ended, or on emotional support animals.
Over the past few months I’ve read 50 or so university accommodation contracts. They throw up problems that map straight onto Code paragraphs, often in contracts that announce the provider’s Code membership a few clauses later.
At least six halls contracts claim a right to enter a student’s room “at any time and for any reason”, a couple of them adding that any notice given is out of “courtesy only”. Paragraph 90 requires 48 hours’ notice for anything other than repairs and a short list of exceptions.
Around a dozen estates fine residents or levy flat fees – warden fines, misconduct scales running to £300, a £250 arrears charge, flat late payment fees – even though paragraph 61 bans fines outright and the Tenant Fees Act applies to university halls. Several let the university cut off in-room internet over arrears, which paragraph 64 rules out.
Around 20 tie halls debt to academic sanctions – withholding awards, barring graduation, blocking re-enrolment and, increasingly, refusing the CAS letter an international student needs to renew their visa – when paragraph 63 says members “must not apply academic sanctions as a matter of course”.
Roughly 18 run halls complaints routes that never mention the OIA, and one tells residents they have three months to go to the ombuds rather than twelve. Others bind students when they move in or click accept, keep the contract behind a login, or treat an unreturned room condition form as proof that nothing was wrong with the room.
The Code itself fares little better. One university links residents to the 2010 edition, another uses three different names for it, and one sends complaints about private accommodation to “Universities UK” – the same misdirection the OIA’s own note makes.
And on leaving early, the issue behind the OIA’s sixth insight, more than 25 estates leave a student who has to go paying for the whole year, or until they find a replacement who isn’t already in halls while the university fills its own empty rooms first – often with a handbook, a web page and a licence that each give a different answer.
This is not a sector short of guidance. The rules exist, providers sign up to them, auditors visit every three years, and the Code publishes annual reports that are supposed to take account of complaints.
Yet the published terms still say things the Code forbids, and the complaints that reach the ombuds read like a list of its paragraphs.
If the OIA and the Code compared notes in public, and SUs were invited into the audits the Code says they should be part of, providers might not need six insights at all – they’d just need to read what they’ve already signed.