The othering of students is getting worse

Maybe they’re thinking about a widening access scheme, public transport, or a meeting with local residents.

What I’m fairly certain of is that they’re not thinking about the role of the local authority in supporting students in poverty.

Back in March 2023, I wrote about how students were being systematically excluded from England’s the Household Support Fund – the £842m pot of money distributed by the government to local councils to help vulnerable households with the cost of living.

The most egregious example at the time was Bath and North East Somerset, which designed a scheme explicitly excluding full-time students unless they received specific benefits (which most can’t claim).

When I wondered how the council would justify that, local residents helpfully explained to me on Twitter that it was “politically complicated” because “students aren’t universally popular” and “handing them discretionary funding isn’t a vote winner.”

Of course, students are citizens and poverty is poverty. The idea that a local authority could get away with discriminating against hungry people on the basis of assumptions about voter behaviour was – and remains – astonishing.

Two and a half years on, we’re now in the seventh iteration of the scheme. The Westminster government allocated £742m for the period April 2025 to March 2026. Food inflation is climbing back up this winter, and student hardship is intensifying. And of course, maintenance loans haven’t kept pace with inflation.

This year for students from England, the max maintenance loan increased by 3.1 per cent. Inflation right now is 4.1 per cent (CPI-H) and rising, with food even higher. But DfE isn’t projecting a 3.1 per cent increase in FT maintenance loan outlay. It’s projecting a 2.6 per cent increase. Why? I suspect because the means test threshold is still at £25,000, where it’s been since 2007.

So I decided to go back and look systematically at what councils are actually doing this time around. Surely things must have improved? They haven’t, and if anything, they’ve got worse.

Change is not inevitable

I went looking across a good number of university-adjacent authority websites, looking at their Household Support Fund schemes for 2025-26. I examined over 50 councils – from major cities to county authorities – looking specifically for any mention of students in their eligibility criteria or delivery plans.

The findings suggest a systematic blind spot that’s become more sophisticated, not less, since I last looked.

Only two authorities explicitly mentioned students at all. One excluded overseas students (citing the “no recourse to public funds” rule). The other, my old friends at Bath and North East Somerset, who are still excluding full-time students.

To be fair to Bath, they do at least direct students to their separate Welfare Support scheme rather than just leaving them in limbo. But the vast majority of authorities don’t mention students at all. Not to exclude them, not to include them – they’re just invisible.

Welcome to the machine

The structural problems have intensified because councils have got better at designing “efficient” schemes – and that efficiency systematically excludes students.

The core issue is that the vast majority of schemes are designed around benefit receipt, while full-time students are statutorily excluded from most means-tested benefits.

Many authorities now use DWP benefit data to proactively identify recipients, sending automatic payments or invitations to those on Council Tax Support, Housing Benefit, or Universal Credit. Full-time students are exempt from Council Tax and largely excluded from these benefits, making them invisible in these data-driven identification systems.

In Leeds there’s an automatic payment to Council Tax Support recipients only. In Manchester, £130 goes to households receiving Council Tax Support AND a disability benefit. In Lincolnshire, 64 per cent goes directly to schools for free school meal children, the rest to District Councils using existing data.

If you’re not in the DWP database, you don’t exist.

Some schemes only accept applications through specific professionals who don’t typically work with students. Leicestershire explicitly states:

No direct applications will be accepted. A referral must be made from a professional support worker or agency.

The list of acceptable professionals is social workers, housing officers, early years centres, health visitors, GPs and nurses. Student support services, university welfare teams and students’ unions don’t make it onto the list.

Worcester says the same:

You cannot apply directly to this scheme – a supporting agency or organisation must apply on your behalf.

Students don’t usually engage with statutory services – they tend to have their own parallel welfare infrastructure. But that infrastructure isn’t recognised.

Where application routes do exist, they frequently prioritise benefit recipients. Portsmouth requires applicants to be pensioners receiving specific disability benefits, carers receiving Carer’s Allowance, or single parents receiving Universal Credit. Kent requires either means-tested benefits OR household income of £33,000 or less – but excludes free school meal families who get separate support.

Even in schemes that claim to be open to those “not on benefits”, the evidence requirements assume you have things students can’t provide – benefit letters, Council Tax Support documentation, housing benefit records and so on.

Reading’s scheme says if you have more than £2,000 in savings, you’re not eligible. The maintenance loan, at least at the start of a term, would count as “savings”.

The ghost of DWP future

The national guidance itself intensifies the problem. The DWP lists vulnerable groups worthy of consideration:

…families with children of all ages, pensioners, unpaid carers, care leavers and disabled people, larger families, single-person households.

Students are not mentioned.

The data provided to authorities to help identify need by the DWP includes benefit claimant information, UC recipients below certain thresholds, those on Pension Credit, ESA and Housing Benefit recipients.

It creates a structural inevitability – if the framework assumes vulnerability equals benefit receipt, and students are excluded from benefits, then students become invisible to the system regardless of their actual need.

Last time I wrote about this, I was hopeful that over multiple iterations of the scheme, councils would learn – start talking to universities, would work with students’ unions, and recognise that the 25 per cent of Bath’s population that are students might include some people in poverty.

Instead, what’s happened is that councils have become more sophisticated at using benefit data to design “targeted” schemes. They’ve created application processes that look open but have eligibility criteria students can’t meet, and have built referral systems that rely on services students don’t use.

Things can only get better?

The truth – then and now – is that local authorities don’t think of students as citizens. Too often, universities don’t think of students as local citizens either. They’re tourists, the university’s problem, and not in “real” poverty.

But poverty is poverty. Whether your income comes from a maintenance loan or universal credit, if you can’t afford to eat, you can’t afford to eat.

With food inflation heading towards a peak this December and with maintenance loans not keeping pace, universities ought to be banging down the doors of their local authorities demanding to know why students have been excluded from local assessments of need.

They should want to know why SUs haven’t been considered as delivery partners, and why the council thinks that student poverty doesn’t count as real poverty. Maybe, just as students themselves are often ashamed about asking for help, universities are too.

And the DWP – with Skills Minister Jacqui Smith now on the inside – needs to stop providing guidance that systematically erases students from consideration, adding them to the list of vulnerable groups.

Directing local authorities to talk to universities and SUs on data and referral paths, and helping councils to identify student households in need, would help too. “Vulnerable households” can, and often does, include student ones.