The Big Issue

At the start of this year over one hundred students were in shared rooms on the University of Bath campus. Overbooking of the University’s accommodation means that some of these students are still without any privacy, living in a space unintended for more than one resident and sleeping on narrow, uncomfortable camp-beds. Most of these students are first year undergraduates who will have had quite a different fresher experience to most of the University’s students.

Despite the new halls and the many refurbishments which have taken place across the campus, for such a volume of students to be essentially homeless within the University is unprecedented. Accommodation has been overbooked in the past because there is no exact method for predicting how many students will achieve the required grades, or how many will come to Bath as a back-up choice. The University generously guarantees to provide accommodation for any students who fulfil certain criteria - the largest of these groups is first year undergraduates - but for so many students to be in this position cannot be regarded as an acceptable level of error.

Bath is not alone in committing this institutional mistake. A change of government policy in July of this year made funding available for ten thousand additional students. In addition, changes to rules on immigration meant that it was not until the 18th October that Accommodation Services were aware of how many overseas students would be able to take up their places and so rooms had to be held for them.
When interviewed, the freshers seemed to have an air of quiet resignation about their situation. With no point of obvious comparison this resignation is understandable. This is, they feel, what university life is. In many ways these students will have had an entirely different experience of Freshers’ Week and their first days in Bath. Though they have the same chance to bond - and have no choice but to bond with their new roommate - when the time comes to move on and a room becomes available they may, in order to find some privacy and space, leave their friends behind and find themselves having to integrate into a group which has already been established. The longer this situation goes on for, the worse its outcome for each student. Accommodation Services have worked to keep the movers close to their former housemates when this has been possible and desired.

Some of the accommodation offered to these students is very pleasant - rooms intended for twin use and rented at less than their usual cost. The worst of the rooms leave a considerable amount to be desired: they have only one ResNet internet port between two people, and one of the two students has been sleeping on an uncomfortable camp-bed ever since his or her arrival. They are faced with a choice between requesting a second desk and further limiting the space available to them, or taking it in turns to work in said space. The ResNet ports can be used by more than one of the users of the room if a router is purchased and in one case the students that we interviewed had invested in this. Not only are these students expected to live in these poor conditions, but they have also to contend with virtually no personal space and no sense of privacy. Some students that impact has spoken to have talked of the problem of being woken at abnormal hours by roommates returning from a night out, or by an early alarm for a lecture.

However, there has been compensation for these homeless freshers by the University. The University has given them a forty percent discount from the original price of the rooms. As a result the two students will pay around ten percent over the original cost of the room; the University is profiting from the students’ loss as a consequence of their policy. They have granted the students twenty pounds of food vouchers to spend on campus, which Accommodation Services have said is intended in no way to compensate the students, but rather as an apology. These vouchers were well received. More interesting in the homeless fresher goodie bag is the mysterious ‘Golden Ticket’. This ticket’s purpose is as a priority service at the BUCS helpdesk, however when presented at the desk one student told us “they didn’t seem to know what it was for”.

The University have claimed they will have the students re-housed within eight weeks of the start of term, but by that time our first semester will be in its final weeks. Accommodation Services have said that, “We are now down to forty-two sharers, so significant progress has been made and we will continue to work closely with all those in a shared situation to ensure that they get transferred to a permanent single study bedroom as quickly as possible.” Accommodation Services are working admirably to resolve this issue and that the University guarantees to house certain groups of people is important. However, this is a problem which cannot be accounted for merely by changes in government policy. This is a failure of University policy, and that failure should be addressed.