Above Photo: From Occupy.com.
Students in Britain have a great deal to be angry about these days. In 2009, the U.K. government made the shock decision to raise tuition fees from £1,000 to £3,000 ($1,400 to $4,300), after the Liberal Democrats reneged on their promise to scrap them entirely and fell into convenient agreement with their Conservative coalition bedfellows. Then, last year, Chancellor George Osborne announced that maintenance grants for the country’s poorest students would be scrapped by September of 2016.
Now, in the latest high profile campaign against rising costs, 150 students across two halls of residence at University College London announced this week that they would be withholding a total of £250,000 ($356,000) in rent payments unless the university reduces their rent by 40%. The students say that rent in UCL halls has risen by around 56% since 2009.
The students are part of the UCL Cut The Rent campaign, which was set up last year when residents of Hawkridge House were compensated a total of £300,000 and residents of Campbell House a total of £100,000 following noisy building work. Hawkridge House also suffered a rat infestation.
Students can borrow a maximum of £10,702 ($15,250) in student loans a year, depending on family income. Residents of Ramsay Hall pay between £158.97 and £262.43 a week in rent and residents of Max Rayne House between £102.97 and £232.4. Tuition fees are £3,000 a year.
UCL’s own website sets out the average London student’s annual living costs, after rent and course costs, at around £7,242 . Amid the current job market, it’s no wonder to many that the cost of studying in London has become prohibitive for all but the most privileged.
One of the rent protesters, Sarah Benamar, a student of French and English who lives in Max Rayne House, told Occupy.com:
“I have decided to withhold my rent because I think it is time to react to the ever-increasing costs of living. The rent is already unaffordable as it is, but the chances are if we do not do anything, things will get worse. This strike is essential because pursuing further education in London is becoming a question of money rather than of ability, as was made more evident by the government’s decision to scrap grants.”
Benamar wants to see this protest act as a catalyst for much wider change – and not just in the student housing sector. “I also hope that this strike will see the start of further action regarding the whole housing crisis in London,” she added.
Pascal Letendre-Hanns, a UCL Union Officer and one of the organizers behind Cut The Rent, told Occupy.com that “last year our protest was mainly to do with specific conditions in halls at the time.”
“Now it’s about how UCL is exploiting students over the long-term in a more general way. Our argument has always been that the greatest impact is on the people who can’t be here because the cost is exclusionary. It restricts the sorts of backgrounds of the people who come here and we’re very much opposed to that,” Letendre-Hanns said.
Does he think the actions will spread beyond just these two residencies? Without a doubt.
“We’ve already had interest from other halls at UCL who want to launch similar actions,” Letendre-Hanns added. “We absolutely want this to spread and for other universities to use it as a model for action. Undoubtedly this is not a problem just for UCL students. The cost of student living is a problem which is endemic across many parts of the country. Access to the highest levels of education is becoming increasingly restricted.”
Some have questioned the legal risks and implications of such a protest. But, Letendre-Hanns said, “Students in halls aren’t actually tenants. They’re licensees, so they have a license agreement with UCL which actually does set out terms of actions they can take against UCL.”
“We’ve had advice from Radical Housing Network regarding the legalities. We’re pretty confident that UCL won’t be pursuing any sort of legal action against the students involved. Last year, the only legality which really emerged was us pointing out that UCL’s threat to stop students from graduating if they didn’t pay rent was actually illegal!”
In a statement released on Tuesday, University College London tried to temper students’ passions. “[We are] actively seeking dialogue with the Cut the Rent campaign so that we can discuss the issues and set out how the finances of UCL accommodation work,” read the statement. “All of the money that UCL receives in rent is ploughed back into residences. While the proportions may vary year to year, we invariably spend more on residences than we receive in rental income.”
But Letendre-Hanns said he and his colleagues aren’t convinced the money is distributed evenly. “We made an FOI request and discovered that they have spent money on halls over the last five years, but only two halls,” he said. “The majority of this money was spent on New Hall, on Caledonian Road, and the funny thing there is that that hall was all over the news being criticized for how poorly it was built and the way it was designed. This means all the other halls have been left out. UCL’s statement doesn’t really give any sort of response to the students on strike.”