Nobody in government has ever said it out loud, but read the Renters’ Rights Act as a set of choices rather than a set of clauses and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that one of its aims is to get students out of shared houses and into purpose-built blocks.
Look at what each kind of student housing was handed.
Purpose-built accommodation run by a code-registered provider was exempted from the new tenancy system wholesale, so it can still sign students up in October, tie them into fixed terms and take the rent upfront.
Landlords of shared student houses got an ability to recover the property each summer, but only if they sign no more than six months ahead and give four months’ notice, and only alongside a ban on rent in advance and a two-month right to leave that students can use to leave “early”.
Students in one- and two-bed flats got nothing at all, and when peers voted to extend Ground 4A to them, the government had MPs overturn it. The minister in the Lords, Baroness Taylor of Stevenage, had already explained why – self-contained homes “are also easier to let to non-students than student HMOs are”. Those flats, in other words, are wanted back for everyone else.
The market has noticed. Foxtons reversed around £3 million of revenue after students used their new right to leave, an HMO sales agent claims £170 million of student house sales in a year, and Unipol expects purpose-built providers to “enter the market early and strongly” this autumn while house landlords tie themselves in knots over holding deposits.
If you’d set out to tilt the board towards blocks, you’d have struggled to do it more decisively.
That might be fine if blocks were affordable. But Unite’s latest results say that “weekly rents now need to be at least £230 for new PBSA development outside of London to be viable”, and Cushman & Wakefield put the blended figure at around £265 a week, while finding that 23 per cent of purpose-built beds in England already cost more than the maximum maintenance loan.
At £230 a week on a 44-week contract, a student pays £10,120 – 93 per cent of the £10,830 maximum loan for students living away from home outside London, which only goes in full to students from households earning £25,000 or less. Quite what they’re supposed to eat for the remaining £710 has never been explained.
It might also be fine if blocks were safe. In social housing, Awaab’s Law has applied since 27 October 2025, requiring landlords to investigate and make safe emergency hazards within 24 hours, investigate other serious hazards within ten working days, give the tenant a written summary within three, do urgent safety work within five, and start longer-term repairs within 12 weeks.
A second phase adds seven more hazard categories from 30 November, and everything in the rating system except overcrowding follows in 2027.
Private renters are now being consulted on getting the same, on a slower clock – an earliest start of 2027, phases modelled to 2030, and enforcement leaning on an ombudsman not expected until 2028.
Some licensees are in too, but only those in supported housing, temporary accommodation and care leaver accommodation, with the government saying that it does “not propose extending Awaab’s Law requirements to all accommodation occupied under licence”.
Students, halls and purpose-built blocks don’t appear anywhere in the document.
Nor are the codes that exempt those blocks set fill the gap. When Unipol reviewed the National Code in 2025 it consulted on response times for damp and mould, then dropped them, saying the issue would be “reconsidered at the new review, when more will be known about Awaab’s Law”.
More is now known, but the version the government approved for May only asks members to take “reasonable steps to comply with” official guidance – and the Code has told members that they won’t need to comply with Awaab’s Law, join the new ombudsman or register on the new database, even as its own complaints rise by more than half in a year.
So the students being nudged into blocks are the ones with no legal repair deadlines, no ombudsman, no database entry and no Decent Homes Standard, paying rents set by build costs rather than by anything a maintenance loan can cover.
Why does this government hate students? Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps it just never thinks about them at all – which, for a first year staring at a mouldy wall in October breathing in spores, comes to much the same thing.