Wales’ international students may get a guarantor for their rent

And it looks like international students are to get a guarantor for their rent.

The White Paper comes off the back of a Senedd committee publishing its findings on the issues earlier this week, and a Green Paper that was published last year as part of the previous co-operation agreement with Plaid Cymru, whose main thrust (certainly on Plaid’s part) was to get a debate going over rent controls.

The Green Paper went further than just “rent controls or not”, and looked more broadly at housing adequacy – both supply (volume and quality) and price – in the private rental sector.

Student accommodation came up several times in that as a distinct market with a distinct set of challenges and potential solutions – and the consultation that ensued also highlighted a clutch of student issues.

It heard, for example, that purpose-built student accommodation – often seen as a solution to housing pressures in towns and cities – charge higher (and often unaffordable) rents when compared to other types of rented housing.

And NUS Cymru gave evidence demonstrating that typical student landlords own multiple properties in an area and are more likely to exploit their tenants for financial gain – because students have limited housing options and are often less aware of their rights.

It argued that the level of rent creates access issues – and that freezing rents or setting a strict price ceiling could create stability and prevent students from being forced to leave their homes. It also said that “first-generation” rent controls (strict limitations on rent increases, or caps on allowable increases) could offer an immediate benefit for tenants.

As such it’s pretty extraordinary that the White Paper barely mentions students at all – save for students’ need for guarantors.

Notwithstanding that the data is often argued to be shaky, HESA had about 66k students in halls, HMOs or other rented in 2022-23 – if nothing else, a green paper and a now a white paper that fails to even guesstimate the number of citizens in the PRS, let alone the number of students, isn’t a great place to start.

On guarantors, the idea is to develop national guidance for the provision of rent guarantor via each local authority. That would deliver a “consistent approach” and “clear eligibility criteria” for those who need to rent but are unable to secure a UK guarantor.

And as well as people experiencing homelessness, refugees, people fleeing domestic abuse, victims of Global Conflict and care leavers, and students – both international and domestic – where they can demonstrate they do not have any credit history in the UK, are enrolled on a full-time course and don’t have access to appropriate funds.

It’s not at all clear that the Welsh Government quite knows what it’s signing local authorities up to in terms of scale – Cardiff alone had about 10,000 international students that would appear to fit the proposed bill in any bill – and I can imagine councils baulking at the idea in the absence of more detailed research and/or compulsion.

Without that, those bits of Wales with a local authority that restricts entitlement or refuses to play ball could suddenly find their universities’ recruitment falls through the floor, and so on. It certainly doesn’t sound like any proper consultation has happened with the Welsh HE sector or even the bit of WG that handles HE.

It would also set a maximum monthly cap of cover, “potentially based on the average rent for the local authority or postcode area”, initially using the Office of National Statistics Private Index of Rental Prices data and later using rent data from the Rent Smart Wales spatial map, once established. That wouldn’t work at all for PBSA – precisely because of the evidence that PBSA rents tend to be higher than average.

In theory, when a prospective tenant can provide a rent guarantor, the consultation says that a landlord or agent would not be justified in requiring rent payment upfront. The bigger question is probably why any landlord – PBSA or HMO – is justified in demanding rent payment upfront.

Still, the principle is there – and a consultation is now on.

Literally the only other mention of students is a footnote that reveals that some tenancies are excluded from Rent Officer data collection, such as student lettings – a lack of data that in and of itself may well be masking problems which require solutions.

Lots of the other stuff in the White Paper might help – but arguably needs a student spin on it. The proposed definition of adequate housing includes security of tenure, protecting against forced evictions and harassment, habitability and space, and has suitable access to employment, healthcare, and education.

That does get the student housing market around the wrong way, really – the point isn’t that landlords need to think about whether there’s a university near when they rent to a student, it’s that councils and universities need to think about whether there’s enough accommodation in the area before agreeing to offer places to students living away from home.

The proposals also pretty much bottle defining “fair rent” – you’d need to define that for students taking into account factors like their income and the cost of living in different areas rather than on, say, wages.

Perhaps inevitably, rent controls get put into another patch of long grass – all justified on a lack of evidence and data. Plaid – riding high in the polls – will almost certainly have something to say about that.